DOMESTICIDAD

Domesticidad emerges from the Latin domus, meaning “house” or “home”. A house is the physical structure we inhabit, while a home is something we continuously build within it through the roles, routines and relationships that shape our lives.

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This body of work has evolved over several years of research and repetitive making. It began with a small house built from balsa wood, colourful and fragile, with no doors or windows. A female figure was suspended somewhere in the roof, seemingly falling from it and escaping through it at the same time. From the beginning, it felt natural that these works should be made from domestic materials, quite literally from the things homes are made of.

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What began as a simple object, the house, gradually became an obsessive repetition of the same form as a way of thinking through making. Repetition allows a way of seeing more precisely.

Through this process, the house begins to reveal its contradictions: fragility and resistance, shelter and confinement. It echoes the experience of migration, always negotiating between arrival and departure, belonging and displacement, visibility and loss.

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As the boundaries between the female body and domestic structures begin to blur, at times the woman becomes the house itself. At others, the house appears to breathe, remember, or hold a body within its walls.

Throughout the series, houses tilt, float, fall or struggle to remain upright. Women carry them, inhabit them, escape from them or gradually become them. Familiar domestic materials such as tea towels, kitchen wipes, aprons, safety pins and fish hooks also appear throughout the work. Their functions become less certain: are they holding, protecting, repairing, piercing, restraining or unravelling?

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Having lived in six countries across four continents, Baqués brings her own experience of movement and repeated resettlement into the work. Home, for her, has never been entirely fixed to a place. It is something constructed and reconstructed through objects, routines, relationships and memory.

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Domesticidad does not seek to resolve these contradictions, but to leave them open.

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What makes a home? What do we need to feel safe, nurtured and at peace within it? What do we surrender in order to sustain it? Where do we draw the lines between love, care, sacrifice and self-preservation?

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Ultimately, the exhibition invites us to reflect on what we build when we make a home, and how, in turn, that home shapes us.