"On ne nait pas femme, on le devient."— Simone de Beauvoir
memoria / matriz
This whole project came from my own healing process, from years of searching to find balance within myself, between the feminine and the masculine. It started with water, an element that represents the unconscious, life, emotion, and transformation. From there, I began to build a visual story in four parts, each one reflecting a stage of that inner process.
It begins with Chalchiuhtlicue, the Mexica goddess of water and childbirth. She represents the moment when life begins, birth as a sacred transformation, when the body becomes a channel for creation and change.
Then comes childhood, when I first started to mirror what I saw. The rituals of “being a girl” began to form, even before I realized it. What I imitated became part of who I thought I was.
As my body changed, things got confusing. It didn’t feel entirely mine anymore; it was observed, commented on, claimed. I learned to hide it, to feel shame or fear about it. So much of that came from generations of silence and conditioning. In adolescence, I rebelled against that, denying the feminine, separating from the mother figure, from the nurturing and intuitive parts of myself.
But eventually, something shifted. A sense of power began to rise, the need to take ownership of my voice, my image, my path. It was messy, though. Growth never comes in a straight line.
Empowerment can be disorienting, full of contradictions and chaos before clarity appears.
The last part of this story is about balance, about finding peace between both sides of myself. It’s inspired by Ardhanarishvara, the Indian deity that embodies the union of masculine and feminine energy. That image, fluid, whole, and in motion, became a symbol of what true harmony can feel like for me.
memoria / matriz is a return to intuition, to my own body and voice, a way of reinventing myself and honoring the balance I’ve been searching for all along.