Mom takes care of me during the week

In this series of Polaroids, the artist documents the specific rituals she performs with her mother, such as tarot card readings, drawing protective symbols on her body, and gazing into the darkness. These are the constant rituals her mother uses to bring her into the world.

Donald Winnicott describes holding as the maternal function of support: a presence that needs neither words nor solutions, only to be. What the artist documents here is not dependence but something more precise: the human need to be held in order to continue supporting oneself. Each gesture of protection and care in these images is a ritual in itself: small, everyday, and irreplaceable.

The artist's mother was her first teacher of rituals. Not because she proclaimed herself as such, but because ritual came naturally to her. She did things like a witch without calling herself one. She is simply a woman in search of tools, and in that search, she taught her daughter that the mystical requires neither name nor institution to be real.

In this sense, this series is not just a document of care; it is an archive of origins. It reveals the origins of rituals, connections to energy, and the conviction that any gesture imbued with intention carries weight in the world. Before amulets, constellations, and signed contracts, there was a mother who drew symbols on her daughter's back and lay with her in bed. Everything else came later.

Bibliography:
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. Hogarth Press. [Spanish translation: El proceso de maduración en el niño. Laia, 1979.]