Exhibition and workshop for a cultural center: Mamá está muerta, pero la vamos a curar

The exhibition helps to ensure that gender-based violence, which occurs mostly in the home, stops being perceived as a mere phenomenon, and that when thinking about a victim, a person is visualized instead of a number. Furthermore, it contributes to extending the responsibility of gender-based violence to society as a whole, rather than limiting it to the family or the private sphere. The exhibition seeks to disrupt myths about gender-based violence that actually sustain it, helping to reveal a different reality.

A large number of women killed by their male partners are murdered at the exact moment they communicate that they are leaving them, or just after they have done so. In those cases, killing is the aggressor’s reaction to an unwanted and unaccepted reality: separation. Before making this book, I would have said that the reason for gender-based violence within couples is solely machismo, but now I see that it is more complex. There are psychological factors (intensified by a lack of emotional tools) that, together with social elements (the stigmas and taboos that affect the private sphere, shrouding it in silence, injustice, or abuse), encourage uncontrolled stress when managing a situation that does not go the way men want it to. Following this logic, focusing efforts on education toward inner strength (the easy path is to act out and aggress; the difficult path is to reflect and accept) can help move toward a society without victims. Whether the reaction is a product of machismo (the man who does this does not acknowledge the woman’s autonomy and feels entitled to dominate her) and/or a product of the aggressive socialization of men within a patriarchal culture (lack of impulse control and low resistance to frustration) does not justify the violence. With the title Mamá está muerta, pero la vamos a curar, we urge social and collective action and responsibility regarding the phenomenon of violence against women.