Ode to the Picket Line - Jessica Morillo

Ode to the picket line

March 20 to July 10, 2025 Text: Jessica Morillo Photography: Alejandra Matufia Editing: Alejandro Alarcón - Amelia Pondal “To unsettle in order to disturb the status quo, to stop the machine of discipline in order to induce a small tremor” Vir Cano Can one be indifferent to the eruption unleashed in the streets? To the mechanism that destabilizes the norm and shakes us from our daily anesthesia? There is something boiling there, amidst chants, overlapping flags, the metallic sound of the megaphone projecting a talking echo that splits the streets, bodies intertwined and united by the fury of injustice; there in that clamor, the common gaze germinates, that communal gesture that embraces, the hope that drives and the strength of those who paved the way, there, in those marches, where no one with a sensitive heart returns the same. The first time I stood at a street blockade, I felt a wave of vertigo wash over me, that emotion that gathers like knots in your throat, your heart surges, and tears flow freely. I experienced the street seeping into my very being. Standing on an edge, I was forced to make a decision, to break free from domestication and indifference, and to plunge into the ever-increasing uncertainty of what can be transformed. In my artistic/political practice, I persistently seek to reclaim that shared gesture, moving from the personal to the collective and vice versa, treasuring the history of used garments, perhaps also searching for the street within those garments, from the diverse materials I collect, from that which pains me. I seek to reconstruct that collective memory, clinging to anger as my driving force because inequality and injustice never manifest individually, even though they try to make us believe otherwise. I choose textiles and their methods as a historical refuge for women, our ancestors, the witches, the artisans, the healers, the artists, and the activists who conspired for other worlds and conjured that shared gesture through textiles. In this exhibition, I share with you a journey of more than 12 years of textile creations and protests, pieces that developed in the heat of the struggles in the streets of Tucumán and in my workshops/homes in a fluctuating, sustained, and always itinerant rhythm, hand in hand with those who collaborated with experiences, donations, documentation, and vital support so that these great textiles and actions could find their voice. In this ode, I borrow this irreverent, insurrectionary, revolutionary, wild, destabilizing method to pay homage to the practice and to those who sustain it, pointing out the flaws in the system and weaving resistance. So as not to become accustomed to the cruel monotony of individualism, to disrupt the well-oiled machinery of big capital. Jessica Morillo