Alejandra Martinez Rueda

Clothing as (Non)Border

2025, Universidad de los Andes

This installation revolves around a single garment, constructed and composed from the stories of people who have experienced exclusion in Bogotá due to migration, racialization, or belonging to marginalized communities. The garment acts as a symbolic body that bears the traces of displacement, forced adaptation, and resistance.

The textile ensemble incorporates aesthetic elements representative of four profiles: a rural woman, a woman from Chocó, a young person from the working-class neighborhoods of southern Bogotá, and a Venezuelan migrant. Each piece of fabric or accessory represents a story, a lived experience, a gaze from another that left a mark on the body.

The work is accompanied by an audio track that plays fragments of interviews, recovering voices, accents, and emotions. A nearby poster displays real expressions of discrimination heard in urban settings, making visible language as a symbolic border.

This piece also emerges from the artist’s personal environment. She grew up watching her mother’s bedsheet workshop become a workspace and source of livelihood for migrant women and youth without education or job opportunities in Bogotá. Through sewing, many of them found not only income but also a place of affection, dignity, and reconstruction. This gesture of collective care runs through the piece and roots it in an ethic of accompaniment and listening.

This work reflects on how migrant and racialized bodies become surfaces for reading and exclusion within the urban space. Through an aesthetic of dispossession and memory, it seeks to make visible what is often ignored: the everyday violences inscribed in clothing, language, and gesture. The piece does not aim to speak for migrants, but rather to create a space to listen from them.