BIO
Romina Chuls (1991, Lima) holds a Bachelor in Fine Arts, with a major in painting, from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru. Later, Romina continued her training with several Peruvian pre-hispanic textile courses, such as brocade weaving, Paracas ringed knitting and backstrap weaving. She completed a residency focus on Mexican embroidery at Arquetopia (2017), in Oaxaca, Mexico. She participated in the Artists in Residence program at Textile Arts Center (2018-2019) and she was granted a residency at Gasworks ceramic studio (2019), both in New York City.
In 2017, Romina presented her first solo show entitled Tierra Incógnita sponsored by the Fundación Euroidiomas Prize. She has also participated in several group exhibitions in cities across Peru, including Paracas, Trujillo, Chiclayo, Huaraz and Lima. Her work has been shown abroad at Ch.ACO Art Fair with Maria Galería, Santiago de Chile (Chile); at Fundación La Miscelánea, Cholula (Mexico); at Centro Cultural Municipal Oduvaldo Vianna Filho, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil); and at Textile Arts Center, Brooklyn, New York City (USA).
Romina has lead embroidery workshops as part of her project Qué rico menstruo in the cities of Lima, Oaxaca and New York.
STATEMENT
As an interdisciplinary feminist artist/artisan/“huesera”, I work around problems faced by Peruvian and Latin American womxn in their daily lives; Problems related to androcentric memory, territorial demarcation, nationalism and sexual and reproductive rights.
The detonator for my projects is always autobiographical, always political. Everything comes from an itchy discomfort, from the beauty of externalizing my pain as part of my spiritual practice, from the reappropriation of my flesh.
The detail attracts me. It’s an invitation to immerse in my installations, in my fiber paintings and in my drawings. In the details I find (and loose) myself. I spill in them my erased history, my silenced ancestors, the stigma of my blood flow and the constraints to decide on my body. I am a detail in a set of knitted, drawn, embroidered, and sculptured bodies. Bodies that build themselves as protagonists, that take space from their pain or release. The textile techniques I use and the colors I choose talk about corporality, skins, and blood. At the same time, the textures suggest land, terrain.
My ceramic pieces carry a hardness that opposes to the vulnerability and action of the body. Both techniques are present in cultures that were targets of epistemicides in Latin America and Perú.
My work is inspired by womxn’s bodies resistance to the structures of oppression imposed by the white supremacist extractivist heteropatriarchy. Women who stain in red in the face from the shame imposed on our fluids, bodies that abort in scenarios of illegality, bodies that have been mutilated, womxn that preserve their memory, womxn whose priorities resist the power of neoliberalism, who are invulnerable to white masculinity. They are the custodians of the memory of resistance, they are my guides to realize, with my projects, magic by analogy.
