With the Weapon of Tenderness:
Miranda Varo and the Re-configuration of the Wounded Landscape

Rooted deeply in her family context of Baja California, Miranda Varo presents a body of work during her residency at Lagos | estudios y residencias that functions as a subverted battlefield. Her proposal is not merely aesthetic; it articulates a vision of decolonial, territorial, and anti-patriarchal feminisms, where the body and the territory merge into a single surface of resistance. In this piece, the textile ceases to be a passive object and becomes a tool for the re-contextualization of violence.

Miranda’s first radical gesture is the substitution of the symbol: she takes the concept of the "weapon" and shifts it from destruction toward creation. By utilizing the tufting gun, Varo does not just construct an image; she executes a political action. While the patriarchal weapon pierces to annihilate, the tufting gun pierces to build. This technique allows her to propose a flexible understanding of violence, moving away from traditional textiles—limited by warp and weft—to explore a structure of multiple layers and structural elements that only tufting permits. It is a textile that breathes and expands, much like the identity she proposes for our liberation.

The piece is presented as a plush surface, a tactile invitation created through the "cut pile" technique. This extreme softness on the face of the work simultaneously hides and reveals the tension of the territory:

• The Sown Field: The background of the rug shows us an image of a living, blooming territory, reminiscent of the Baja California landscape.

• The Silhouetted Shadow: Cast over this idyllic landscape are the shadows of human figures carrying weapons.

This is where the piece demands the viewer's participation through a physical "reading cue": one must step on the shadow. However, one does not step with hate, but with a consciousness of softness. Miranda proposes radical tenderness as a method: inhabiting the space of violence, recognizing it, and moving through it with the firm intention of remaking ourselves. By joining the image of the violated territory with the action of creating a soft surface upon which to walk, Miranda Varo materializes the possibility of a "room of one's own" that exceeds the limits of the patriarchy.

It is not just about representing violence, but about dismantling it through matter. The piece is an exercise in spatial sovereignty where the act of stepping becomes a ritual of healing and appropriation. Ultimately, it is a demonstration of how textile technique—in the hands of a decolonial vision—can transform a weapon into a bridge and a wound into a flowered field.

Miranda’s work is an invitation to inhabit structural flexibility, reminding us that to dismantle the master's house, it is sometimes necessary to use his tools—but loaded with the thread of memory and the strength of women in community.

olgaMargarita dávila

chief curator