In Naming them, each stitch holds a story and each thread calls not to forget them

Textiles with the embroidered names of victims of feminicide, in order to reclaim and restore their identity, are part of the exhibition name them, which is presented in the Siqueiros room of the Jardín Borda Cultural Center in Cuernavaca, Morelos.

Organized by the graphic and textile artist María Antonieta de la Rosa and the collective Las Nombramos Bordando, the exhibition is a protest in which each piece entails a lot of work, empathy, pain and love.

Regarding the exhibition, María Antonieta de la Rosa indicated that it “is born from a reality that in an ideal world should not exist. Its need is testimony to the crisis we face. However, in the face of the crude reality that women experience daily, art becomes a fundamental instrument to raise our voices and make visible the invisible and, above all, to preserve memory.”

The pieces, De la Rosa added, “are silent witnesses of rage and pain, since they have been made with the hands of a lot of women who worked painfully to name a woman, whose life has been taken and justice is not enough. This is not an exhibition, it is a protest.”

For the organizers, the embroideries made by hundreds of women in the past five years, “make sure that memory is not erased and that justice continues to be that tireless cry with colored threads until it arrives.”

Karime Díez, a member of the group Las Nombramos Bordando, indicated that this arose after the feminicide of Ingrid Escamilla in 2020, and that they hold a call every year to embroider in different places; The most recent took place at the Juan Soriano Morelense Museum of Contemporary Art, where a name was assigned to the participating embroiderers.

She explained that, historically, “embroidery has been used to reinforce gender stereotypes, in the sense that women embroider and remain silent, but the truth is that that has changed and is now used as an expression of protest. María Antonieta de la Rosa devised this project; she suggested moving from textile art to protest to make femicide visible, this terrible reality that exists in the country; it has been moving to see all the embroidery.”

Curated by María Antonieta de la Rosa, the exhibition brings together pieces that reveal the power of the thread and the needle as tools of activism, accompaniment, denunciation and construction of collective memory.

Far from being an anonymous cipher, each embroidered name becomes a permanent reminder of a life taken, an act of resistance against oblivion.

“We have seen that people come because of the beauty of the embroidery, because they are works of textile art, made with the hands of many women. We have registered more than 120 women who have participated with us in the last five years.

“When we tell people that the names they see are of victims of femicide, their face changes and they take a reflection. The message is strong; when older people come because they like to embroider, they can’t imagine what we actually capture.”

Created to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the exhibition transforms embroidery into an act of memory, resistance and care. Each stitch holds a story and each thread weaves a call not to forget.

Name them It can be visited from Tuesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the Siqueiros room of the Jardín Borda Cultural Center, in Cuernavaca, Morelos. The exhibition will conclude on February 22, 2026.