Silhouettes is a suspended and floor-based work that remembers and memorialises people who have been abducted by Government or insurgent guerillas over a particularly tumultuous number of decades in Peru's history.
Esquives pays special attention to suspended fabric silhouettes, decorating them in the Peruvian folkloric style of religious costumes. With her glistening, delicate and detailed textures and patterns, she honours all of those people who have simply 'disappeared.' When a person disappears in Peru (and indeed, South America), they are stripped of their identity and given a number.
With Silhouettes, Esquives, allows us to reject that form of violence and recognise that all of the disappearing people are loved as mother, father, brother, sister, son or daughter.
Raquel has poignantly highlighted the generational impact of the abductions as a woman, now a 'silhouette,' is carrying her baby at the moment of her disappearance.
28 Days is a multi-component textile-based work that relates to a woman's menstrual cycle, a tabu topic in Peru that Raquel links, with the same careful folkloric approach, to the generational history and identity of women in her country.
The full number of 400 components (were this work to be fully installed) relate directly to the number of times a woman menstruates, on average, during her lifetime.
