Introduction
We say we ‘know’ Frida Kahlo. But do we understand her? What lies behind her creativity, the way she dressed, loved and lived? And why is she, after so many years, a world icon more potent than ever? We invite you to dive into an immersive biography, one which fills us with almost as many questions as it proposes answers...
The AltarIn Mexican tradition, the altar of the dead is a space where the living are reunited with their deceased loved ones.
From 31 October to 2 November, depending on the circumstances of their deaths, souls return to the family home where they will find everything they once enjoyed in life waiting for them.
In the simplest and most common of these altars there are two levels, representing Earth and Heaven. In the most complex and faithful to tradition there are seven levels, representing the steps necessary to achieve eternal rest.
An altar to the dead must provide certain necessities: water, which symbolises purity and quenches the thirst of the dead after their long journey; candles, whose flames are the light of hope and guidance; incense, to drive away evil spirits; and flowers – especially cempasúchil (marigolds) – whose colour and scent show souls the way home.
Traditional stews, together with the
pan de muertos (bread of the dead), fruit, sugar skulls and other representations of death are also regarded essential, along with the deceased’s favourite alcoholic tipple to make them feel welcome. Everything is decorated with
papel picado (punched paper), highlighting the festive spirit of the Day of the Dead.
An image of the dead person presides over the altar, on which objects they loved or which define them are placed. From the Catholic tradition come images of the Cross and of souls in Purgatory. An arch decorated with flowers tops the small chapel: it is the portal that must be crossed in order to enter the world of the dead.
Childhood
Frida Kahlo liked to misrepresent the actual date of her birth (6 July, 1907), instead claiming that she entered the world with the Mexican Revolution of 1910. It’s fair to say that, although she was not born with The Revolution, a revolution came with her.
Daughter of Wilhelm (rebaptised as Guillermo) Kahlo, a German immigrant who made his name as a photographer, and of his second wife Matilde Calderón, an uneducated, highly religious woman of mixed European and indigenous ancestry, Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón is born in Coyoacán, Mexico City, at a turbulent time.
Workers are protesting the social inequalities emerging under the regime of Porfirio Díaz, the military leader who has governed the country since 1877. These protest movements will eventually result in the Mexican Revolution of November 1910 and will see Díaz thrown out of office in 1911.
The young Frida is a restless and mischievous child. The fourth of five sisters (the two eldest born to her father’s first wife), she faces hard times from a very young age. A decade of civil war brings financial problems to her family, and when Frida is six years-old, she develops poliomyelitis – known commonly as polio – which atrophies the muscles of her right leg.
Other children make fun of Frida because one leg is thinner and shorter than the other and because she wears an orthopaedic boot. She withdraws into herself, often finding comfort in the small but select library kept by her father at the Blue House, the Kahlo family home. Her father Guillermo also spends many hours there, reading, playing the piano and painting. Frida becomes very close to him, and absorbs his passions as her own.
At the same time, from her mother, she learns how to run a home in an ailing economy and to support the revolutionaries. Among her treasured memories of that time is the image of her mother allowing the Zapatistas (members of the revolutionary movement led by Emiliano Zapata) to enter the house via a window in order to eat and tend to battle wounds received during the “Ten Tragic Days” of coup d’etat in February 1913.
Adolescence
In 1922, Frida achieves a milestone that will make an unimaginable imprint on her life: she is one of just 35 women to secure a place among the 2000 students in the National Preparatory High School, in the heart of Mexico City, an essential first step to university and, in Frida’s case, to becoming a doctor.
The school aims to educate young people who will be the driving force of the country, and is a focus of social and political upheaval. It teaches pride in Mexican culture and emphasises the need to recover it from the forces of colonisation and society’s eagerness to imitate European tastes and habits.
Removed from the strict Catholicism of her mother and protected by the anonymity of a great city, Frida soon shows the world who she really is: quick-witted, curious, impulsive, brave and irreverent. She immediately joins a student group called “The Cachuchas” (named after the caps they wear), who become a second family to her.
Through them, Frida discovers new authors and currents of thought, and how much she enjoys withstanding the mores of the established order. Cachuchas compete for the honour of being the most voracious reader and the greatest mischief-maker. It’s here that Frida finds her first love, Alejandro Gómez Arias, the group’s leader.
Three years after entering the National Preparatory High School, the girl who arrived with plaits and a German secondary school uniform is now a cultivated young lady with clearly defined ideas. She is very popular among her peers and sometimes likes to wear peasant skirts. But her life is about to change.
The AccidentOn 17 September, 1925, fate hits Frida’s life like a thunderstorm.
It is a rainy day, and while returning by bus to Coyoacán after her lessons, Frida realises she has forgotten her umbrella. With her love Alejandro, she alights from the vehicle to look for it. After a while, they both take another bus homeward. In the next few minutes, a tram smashes into them.
Frida’s wounds “belong to the type necessarily causing death”, writes a journalist in the journal
El Universal, the following day. Yet Frida survives. Thanks to that damned umbrella, she must give up her dreams of becoming being a doctor and instead be a patient for the rest of her life – a patient with the ability to turn her constant pain into great art.
Passions
Frida has three great passions: painting, political activism and love. And all three of them converge on the powerful figure of Diego Rivera.
There are many legends about how Frida and Diego met, but the accepted truth is that they cross paths at the end of 1928 in the house of Italian-American photographer and communist Tina Modotti. Diego is twice Frida’s age and has just divorced for the second time. Frida has only recently broken up with Alejandro.
Their passion is immediate and lasting. After less than a year together, on August 21, 1929, Frida and Diego get married for the first time. They will divorce in November 1939, only to marry again, 13 months later. Theirs is a life of fighting and reconciliation, encounters and abandonments, promises and sexual infidelities. But their bond will be eternal.
Diego greatly admires Frida, personally and as a painter, encouraging her to trust in her talent and take care of her physical health. Yet he never gives up affairs with artists, models and helpers, no matter how painful they are for his wife.
Frida, too, goes from lover to lover. In her bed and in her heart we find personalities such as sculptor Isamu Noguchi, photographer Nickolas Muray and gallery owner Julien Levy. She will have an affair with the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky during his exile in Mexico. It is also believed she had relationships with actress María Félix and singer Chavela Vargas.
We know for sure she falls in love with the Catalan illustrator Josep Bartolí, whom she meet in New York in 1946, and with whom she maintains a passionate relationship until 1949. A score of letters signed by Frida as “Mara”, auctioned in 2015, bear witness to their love.
But none of these people can keep her away from Diego Rivera, whom she considers an artistic genius, an ideological inspiration, and a partner in the communist cause. After their divorce (in the wake of Diego’s infidelity with Frida’s sister, Cristina), Frida works hard to become economically independent from Diego. She sells her paintings and works as an art teacher, but she remains emotionally dependent.
Motherhood
Frida has an inexhaustible need to love. She eases it with endless affairs and friendships but she cannot devote it to the thing she wants most: a child. Due to the wounds the accident caused to her pelvic area, none of her pregnancies succeed, and she experiences several miscarriages, deepening her distress. During her convalescent periods, Frida’s paintings capture her pain.
Her maternal instinct never leaves her, however, and Frida directs it towards the children of others. Her nephews and nieces adore her, as do the children of her friends and patrons. She lavishes attention on plants and pets. She and Diego live surrounded by foliage, by monkeys, parrots, pigeons, dogs and cats. They even have a deer and an eagle. The couple can be seen stroking them and playing with them in many pictures, and Frida frequently includes them in her self-portraits, in which monkeys and parrots are held in her arms like the babies she can never have.
Students of the Painting and Sculpture School of the Public Education Secretariat, known as “La Esmeralda” (The Emerald), where Frida gives classes from 1943, are also beneficiaries of her maternal instincts. Frida is more than a teacher: she accompanies her students on their artistic, political and personal discoveries; she introduces them to the leading painters and intellectuals who are her friends; she provides them with resources when they have none, and she creates opportunities for them to show their art.
When poor health prevents her from giving classes, the students go to the Blue House. Collectively, these budding artists are called “Los Fridos”, as if they were her children.
Travel
In 1917, the Russian Revolution puts an end to the Tsarist regime and ushers in what will become the Soviet Union. The whole world is shaken. A completely new state is created, based on an entirely different economic model. Seeing that capitalism is not the only possible option, the world is divided into two irreconcilable blocs.
Communist parties proliferate across the globe, including in Mexico in 1919. Diego Rivera joins the Communist Party three years later; Frida Kahlo does so in 1928. Both will share an enthusiasm for communism until their death – though this does not prevent Frida and Diego from spending much time in the United States, the avowed adversary of communism worldwide.
San Francisco is the first American city to embrace them, after Diego receives proposals for mural paintings there and Frida accompanies him. They live here for seven months from 1930-31, followed by long stays in New York and Detroit, where Diego also receives commissions for new works.
For three years they are courted by American high society as well as the country’s artistic community. Frida tells her friends that she dislikes “Yankeedom” people, but the statement belies her very active social life in the United States. Diego and Frida’s communist affiliations do not prevent the couple from enjoying the largesse of capitalists including the Rockefellers and the Fords.
Frida arrives in the United States as the wife of the highly acclaimed Diego Rivera, but little by little, she begins to assert her own identity as an artist. She receives the first offer of an individual exhibition in New York at Julien Levy’s gallery.
Then, in 1939, Frida makes another critical step toward artistic recognition: she travels to Paris to participate in a showcase of Mexican art organised by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. She is the star of the exhibition. The following year, two of her paintings are included in the International Surrealist Exhibition. She will be the first Mexican artist from whom the Louvre buys a painting.
Icon
There can be no mistake. Those eyebrows. The hair buns decorated with flowers. We know it is her. The medium doesn’t matter (T-shirts, a handbag, a poster or fridge magnet, even tattoos on the skin), nor does the place: Frida Kahlo is an icon in all corners of the world.
She is iconic for her attitude to adversity: painted stretched out on her bed, her body immobilised by a plaster corset, but with her mind moving in search of freedom.
She is iconic for her ideological commitments: to Mexico’s Zapatistas, to Spain’s Republicans, for attending a communist demonstration in a wheelchair just 11 days before she dies.
She is iconic for her transgression of convention: for her handling of her relationship with Diego in the way she thought suited her best, regardless of what others thought; for daring to wear Tehuana costume at the parties of the American elite; for standing up to the prevailing beauty paradigm, which not only prevented her from being desired, but formed part of what made her so desirable.
Frida knew how to be unique. Long before marketing talked “brand” and “image”, she made traditional costumes, eyebrows and her moustache a seductive sign of self-confidence, and an identity signal strong enough to evoke in a single stroke, like a logo.
Perhaps Frida’s work risks being overshadowed by her life and personality. But they cannot be separated. She demonstrated this until her last day, especially when in 1953, a year before her death, her first individual exhibition opened in Mexico. Physically weak at this point in her life, she had an ambulance transport her to a bed installed in the gallery, where she stretched out as in so many of her pictures to greet her admirers. Around her, friends sang Mexican songs late into the night.
When she died, on July 13, 1954, there was a finished painting in her trestle. Some watermelons, which would keep her forever attached to life, watched over her last sleep.
Chronology
1907
Frida is born on 6 July, in Coyoacán, daughter of a German photographer and an Oaxaca housewife. They live in the Blue House.
1913
Frida contracts poliomyelitis – commonly known as polio – which partly paralyses her right leg.
1922
She enters the National Preparatory High School to become a doctor.
1924
On 17 September Frida suffers a terrible accident, the effects of which she will bear all her life. She starts painting during the convalescence.
1928
Frida joins the Mexican Communist Party and takes part in meetings. She meets Diego Rivera, who encourages her to continue painting.
1929
On 21 August, she marries Diego Rivera.
1930
On 10 November, Frida travels to San Francisco, accompanying Diego. They will remain there for seven months.
1932
In Spring, they move to Detroit. In July, Frida suffers a miscarriage (she will endure at least three more during her life), which keeps her 13 days at the Henry Ford Hospital.
1933
On 14 March, Frida and Diego travel to New York so that Diego can begin work on a mural painting for the Rockefeller building.
1937
On January 9, Leon Trotsky and his wife, Natalia, arrive in Mexico. They stay at the Blue House.
1938
Frida achieves her first important sale: to the actor and noted art collector Edward G. Robinson. In October, she travels to New York to oversee her first individual exhibition.
1939
In January, Frida travels to France to participate in the Exhibition Mexique organised by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. The Louvre buys her painting The Frame. In November, she signs the papers to divorce Diego.
1940
The International Surrealist Exhibition opens in Paris, with two paintings by Frida. In August, Trotsky is murdered in Coyoacán. Frida is interrogated for 12 hours because the murderer, Ramón Mercader, has been seen at her house at least twice. She reconciles with Diego, and on 8 December, they are married for the second time.
1946
Frida returns to New York with her sister Cristina in order to undergo a spinal fusion procedure. There she meets Josep Bartolí, with whom she will have a three-year relationship.
1953
On 13 April, Frida inaugurates her first individual exhibition in Mexico. She travels to the gallery in an ambulance, and receives visitors on a bed installed in the room. In August, her right leg is amputated.
1954
On 13 July, Frida dies at the Blue House. The night before, she had given Diego a ring to celebrate their silver wedding in advance. The next day, she receives a tribute from the Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City.
ROOM 1. The Immersive Biography
You are about to dive into the life of Frida Kahlo. In this room, you will travel back in time to the Mexico into which she was born as a woman and as an artist. You will share her landscapes, accompany her on her journeys, and follow her through joy, sadness and obsessions.
In this immersive biography, you will come to know:
• Frida’s childhood and adolescence, decisive stages in her configuration as an artist.
• The passions that shook her and were reflected in her work.
• Her frustrated motherhood and the strategies she used to ease the pain it caused.
• The journeys which influenced her personal and professional life.
• The aesthetic and visual choices that have made her into an international icon.
Duration is 30 minutes.
It is reproduced on a continuous loop.
Please: Do not touch screens
Do not take pictures with flash
Do not eat or drink inside the room
MARTES STUDIO, RAFFEL PLANA, DANIEL LLAMAS & IDEAL
Martes is an audiovisual studio based in Barcelona and founded in 2017 by Roger Amat, Joan Molins and Xavi Trilla. Specialised in art direction, post-production, editing, animation and graphic design, its work encompasses advertising, video mapping, television and music videos. Its philosophy is based on experimentation, enjoying the creative process and finding new ways of artistic expression for each project.
Raffel Plana is a musician, composer and producer. In the last twenty years he has taken part in many scenic arts shows and audiovisual productions.
Daniel Llamas is a sound technician and designer with a wide experience in television, cinema and advertising.
ROOM 2. Cadavre Exquis / Photobooth A.I.
The virtual reality experience is inspired by Frida’s life and work, showing both her environment and her pictorial world, and the particular imagery that made her an inimitable artist.
This visual journey is divided into three phases:
• The exploration of her life: the spectator enters Frida’s house in Coyoacán, at the beginning of the 20th century, and starts the trip from the bed where the artist spent long convalescences.
• Her imagery: the circuit continues with a dreamlike journey through scenes featuring characteristic visual elements of her work.
• Death: the mourning and the altar, elements deeply rooted in Mexican culture, are the main characters, which then give way to the iconographic Renaissance of Frida’s figure thanks to the digital era.
blit & IDEAL
blit. is the creative study that makes straight lines dance, specialised in the creation of visual content for brands, events, music and art. Six years ago, it began a project to produce visual rhythm for dance halls – rhythm which quickly started climbing the walls of buildings, event halls and monuments. Blit has been acknowledged internationally as a visual creator in Moscow’s Circle of Light Festival, placing first in the Art Vision competition. Its mapping “Rere el vidre” (Behind the glass) was awarded in Girona’s Mapping International Festival.
blit productions are always out of the box, with unconventional formats, large-scale projections and impossible screens leading to virtual reality.
Soundtrack and Effects. Raffel Plana is a musician, composer and producer. In the last twenty years, he has taken part in many scenic arts shows and audiovisual productions. Daniel Llamas is a sound technician and designer with a wide experience in television, cinema and advertising.
PHOTOBOOTH A.I.: ALIVE FRAGMENTS
Interactive installation. Generative collage algorithm and neuronal network.
The main theme in Frida Kahlo’s work was Frida Kahlo. Her self-portraits narrate her life, establishing a combative and rebellious identity, with a pictorial language full of symbols, icons and colour. This interactive installation, connected to the idea of creating an alternative version of ourselves, offers a vibrating portrait made of fragmented natural beauty and symbolic elements around the life and work of the great Mexican artist.
This interactive installation comprises a generative algorithm and a neuronal network trained to understand the human face and create portraits using generative collage techniques. Chance determines each portrait. The algorithm created by the artist defines an infinite space with unique portraits. This suggests a simple but powerful concept: the algorithm itself is the work of art.
Sergio Albiac & IDEAL.
Sergio Albiac experiments with the visual intersection of the generative code, artificial intelligence and traditional media. Albiac creates computer programmes that transform reality to express ideas about identity, chance and human emotions.
The illusion of control in a world ruled by uncertainty, and the tension between reason and passion, are recurring themes in his work. The artist wants to stimulate a reflection on human identity, perception, memory and emotional life through proposals intended to generate doubts rather than provide answers. Sergio Albiac lives and works in Barcelona.
Credits, use of data, conditions and privacy. Illustrations from the collage © Frida Kahlo Corporation. This installation takes a picture of your face and uses it to create an artistic portrait. Once the portrait is created, your picture is permanently deleted.
The created portrait is stored in the cloud for one day so that you can download it on your mobile. Portraits created by the installation have a Creative Commons BY-NCND 4.0 licence. When using the installation, you accept these use conditions and give your permission to create the portrait from your image.
ROOM 3: The Accident / Convalescence
The AccidentFrida, who always used paintings as a window to her soul, never painted the accident that changed her life. It was impossible to reduce it to just one image, she said. How many images are necessary to reflect the pain of so much avoidable misfortune? Her presence on the bus, avoidable had she not gone back to look for an umbrella. The crash, avoidable if drivers had paid attention to the traffic.
Her spinal column broken at three points of the lumbar region, the fractured clavicle, the broken ribs, the eleven fractures in the right leg, the crushed right foot, the dislocated right shoulder, the crushed pelvis, the bus handrail entering her body through her left side and exiting via her vagina. Avoidable.
Entering the hospital with blood and life escaping through her wounds. The month spent there, wondering if she would ever heal, and the many more months at home, stretched out in one position, imprisoned by the plaster of corrective corsets and wounded by the iron fittings of regenerating machines. Twenty-eight corsets immobilised her throughout her life: one made of steel, three made of leather, the rest of plaster.
All of it, avoidable.
The InstantSome instants change us forever. The work
The Instant shows the moment that transformed Frida Kahlo’s life, a second in which her human fragility, physical and emotional was revealed. An instant revisited by Frida throughout her life. The work intends to represent this space in the artist’s memory, an instant frozen in time. A life rupture, a transforming instant of vulnerability.
MultilayerMultilayer is a tri dimensional installation which, by overlapping transparent layers, creates a volumetric video effect. This installation is the first step towards a new concept of holographic video. Multilayer has its own post-production workflow to create, edit and reproduce sectioned images, making the spectator perceive them as a single image.
NueveojosNueveojos is a digital art studio founded in 2008 in Barcelona by Mariona Omedes, Carles Mora and Karin du Croo. The studio specialises in audio-visual content for shows, exhibitions and events from a multidisciplinary perspective, and always with a pictorial look, as reflected in their projects.
In 2018, Nueveojos invents a new projection format – Multilayer – released with the work
Welcome.
The Instant is the second work created with this format.
The ConvalescenceAfter so many avoidable misfortunes comes the unavoidable: the long and painful convalescence.
Fate defeated Frida that afternoon, but in convalescence she exercises the power to rebel against her misfortune. She transforms the painter’s trestle her mother ordered to be installed on her bed to help kill time during recovery into an emotional battlefield, into an encyclopedia of herself. Frida transforms an amusement into a powerful reason to stay rooted to the land and to life.
Frida sees the whole world inside her bedroom and in her own image, reflected on the mirror over her head which makes a sky. She learns to see a brilliant future, not broken promises. Frida sublimates suffering and transforms it into art and legend, escaping her bed and blazing, like a flare, into immortality.
The DreamLife and death come together in this installation to show Frida’s imagery from the place where she created a significant part of her work: her bed. Work that constantly refers to life cycle: birth and death, health and illness. And in the middle of this cycle, a texture and colour bath which she used to show her feelings – textures that, in the case of this mapping, are inspired in her work through an artificial intelligence algorithm, free and accessible for everyone.
Jordi Massó & IDEALJordi Massó is a visual artist whose work is focused on video mapping, real-time visuals and immersive and interactive environments. He was a member of the Eyesberg Studio, where he participated in large-format installations for events, theatre and opera and co-operated with artists such as Franc Aleu, Albert Pla and La Fura dels Baus. In 2019, he made his solo debut with the film Smartzombies, presented at the Mira Festival.
ROOM 4: Infinite Symbology
Entering the artistic universe of Frida Kahlo is to immerse oneself in her private world. Frida’s work repels labels. Although she is frequently grouped among Surrealists due to the influence of André Breton on her career, she did not consider herself part of the movement because she said she didn’t paint her dreams, rather her reality.
The way in which her own self subtly yet shamelessly invades each part of her work is her hallmark, and what makes her unique.
Frida’s complex personality, her constant pain and desire to live, her need to seem composed outside though broken inside (literally), generates the symbolic language that defines her. In this language, skulls are a recurring element; a universal symbol of death, but passed through the sieve of Mexican tradition, in which the end is also a beginning. Nobody knew it better than she did: the artist was born from the accident that left her at death’s door.
Beds and stretchers also appear frequently in her paintings, as frequently as in her reality. From the accident, she underwent 32 operations, including the amputation of her right leg, one year before she died. On the beds that appear in her works, sometimes death stalks her; sometimes there are roots attaching her to Earth, to life.
Pain is expressed in Frida's work through sharp objects: necklaces of thorns, nails, arrows and knives, which cause bloody cuts and holes. These symbols often appear in self-portraits, in which Frida stoically lives with her wounds, accepting that suffering is inseparable from living.
Such dualities are very present in her work. The sun shares space with the moon. A face can be half Frida, half Diego; and two Fridas – one with her heart intact and the other one with a broken heart – configure just one Frida, the genuine one. The hummingbird, which in Mexican tradition represents good luck in love – something Frida longed for so much – only responds to reality when painted dead.
And fruit: watermelons, pomegranates, papayas...opened, fleshy and juicy, evidently refer to sexuality and fertility, imperfect but desirable, and in several stages of freshness and ripening, as if they were people, as if they were Frida herself.
Frida's Universe
Frida’s Universe is a sensorial reactive installation, where Frida’s symbology encourages playing and exploring a dreamlike landscape, full of colour and movement.
Play a bit & Ideal
Play a bit is a creative laboratory interested in the convergence of art, design and technology. It works with multiple formats and technologies, creating everything from objects or video games to immersive experiences and participative installations. Its members, Lucía Segurajauregui and Toni Jaime, have participated in events and national and international exhibitions such as Ars Electronica, Sónar, Llum, ESC and Media Lab Prado, among others.
ROOM 5: The Self-Portrait / La Rosita
The Self-PortraitEighty per cent of Frida Kahlo’s works are self-portraits. She paints herself, she says, because it is the subject she knows best.
She starts portraying herself during the convalescence after the accident, when painting (first an entertainment, then a therapy) enters her life. Her mother buys a trestle, which is adapted to allow Frida to paint while stretched out. She has a full-length mirror installed on her bed so she can be both artist and model.
When she paints herself, Frida reflects her contradictions. Her face is like an impassive mask in which only the look and elements surrounding it reveal the truth. Frequently, there are tears, but she doesn’t cry. Suffering shows in a slight rictus curve, in a dead bird, in a thorn necklace that strangles her, or in a ruined heart. She seems calm, but the pain is filtered.
Her self-portraits also form part of the construction of her character. In the first self-portrait she painted in 1926, she wears a velvet dress and looks like a Renaissance muse. Later she will appear in traditional Mexican dresses that characterise her as a village woman, rooted to the land and ancient practices, and accentuating physical features that make her singular, like her monobrow.
Her paintings will also allow her to be economically independent of Diego: she has purchase orders, and paints many similar self-portraits, as if done in series, to start earning a living with painting.
PULQUERÍA LA ROSITA
From her first day as a painting teacher at La Esmeralda school, Frida’s students realise she will not be like the teachers they are accustomed to.
She herself warns them that more than a teacher, she will be a friend and catalyst. She urges them to go beyond the classroom, to know their environment and the traditions of their country. She wants them to trust their own talent and take their art to the streets, translating their discoveries into mural paintings within reach of the public.
To encourage this, she proposes they recover a Mexican custom: decorating the pulquerías, the bars selling pulque, a traditional alcoholic beverage.
Pulquería La Rosita is the place chosen to implement the project. On the bar walls, the Fridos recreate daily scenes, habits and dozens of tiny roses, in reference to the place’s name. The palette of their teacher, full of vibrant colours, was their inspiration.
The inauguration of the new décor, on 19 June 1943, was an event in itself: cultural personalities mixed with people of the neighbourhood, there was food and drink, Tehuana costumes, mariachi musicians and even fireworks. Its success opened the students up to new projects.
Experience interactive digital art
Paint your Frida painting and take part in the decoration of the Pulquería La Rosita. We will hold a great fiesta! This technological and creative experience combines artificial intelligence and digital art in the service of interactivity for the little ones – and the not so little ones too!
Broomx & IDEAL
Broomx is a Catalan technological company specialised in creating immersive experiences in real spaces. It has created the first immersive projects in the world, and other technological solutions in the cultural and touristic sphere, plus in the areas of mental health, rehabilitation and social and healthcare services in several countries of the world.
ROOM 6: Fashion Icon
Painting served Frida as a way of exposing herself. In clothing, however, she was hiding. The minute she arrived at any place, the velvet skirt, the richly embroidered blouse, the hair decorated with flowers or coloured ribbons and the spectacular jewels attracted every eye. But everyone saw exactly what Frida wanted to project: pride in her Mexican roots, self-assurance, the joy of living.
Under the skirt was a leg ravaged by poliomyelitis. Beneath her blouse was the corset that straightened her back but took her breath away. The vibrant hair and jewellery distracted attention from signs of sadness on her face. The worse Frida felt, the more effort she put into composing her image, outwardly radiant before the world. Pain and sadness were confined to paintings.
She soon understood that this image made her unique. In a room full of women fighting to squeeze their bodies into tight dresses and their feet into high heels, she stood out in her traditional dress and peasant huaraches. Like those women, she too was a city girl, educated in a bourgeois atmosphere. But her clothing linked her to the land and to indigenous culture, and that authenticity and commitment eclipsed them all.
Frida the artist also showed up when choosing each model: she combined forms and colours of elements with which she groomed herself, as if they were part of her work. And she frequently sewed on additional laces, ribbons or embroideries that personalised them even more.
Her style was so distinct that she appeared on Vogue’s cover in 1937. And after her stay in Paris to prepare the Exhibition Mexique, in 1939, fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli created the dress “Madame Rivera” in her honour.
These were not the only magazines or fashion designers to choose Frida as a source of inspiration. To this day her image has appeared in countless publications around the world, and great fashion figures such as Givenchy, Jean Paul Gaultier or Valentino have made collections paying tribute to her.
TRADITIONAL WEAVING COOPERATIVE RENACER 8.2
On 7 September, 2017, an earthquake of magnitude 8.2 hit Asunción Ixtaltepec, a village from the Tehuantepec isthmus, in Oaxaca, in which we, a great part of its inhabitants, lost everything we had. The economic and emotional collapse was terrible.
But we, the isthmus women, found a way to get by. We decided to recover the traditional weaving of the area, taking part in educational workshops, and working together to improve.
From this experience, we three women, Rosa, Iris and Arelia, decided to form a cooperative, which we called Renacer 8.2, in a clear reference to how this work allowed us to reemerge after the earthquake disaster.
The three of us share a passion for isthmus embroidery with the hook technique, with which we intend to cross boundaries. We like innovating, making embroideries in skirts, T-shirts, blouses and dresses, and playing with colour. We dream of other countries knowing and valuing our clothing, and of exchanging with them cultural knowledge which also enriches the work we do, as each piece of clothing carries a part of our essence. Behind each stitch there are thoughts, illusions, dreams and, above all, a lot of love.
Our aim is to teach the women around us, and for this knowledge to become an ingrained habit which can contribute to their family economy, or even enable their economic independence, without leaving household care aside.
OAXACA COMMUNITY FOUNDATION
Twenty-five years ago, we, several civic representatives, as well as some local and national businessmen enthusiastic about development of the region, realised that it was necessary to address economic and social issues that affected the natural, gastronomic, geographical and diverse majesty of Oaxaca.
This is why, in 1996, we decided to come together to create the Fundación Comunitaria Oaxaca (Oaxaca Community Foundation – FCO), an initiative aimed at proving the capacity of civil society to get organised, with the purpose of improving the living standard of the region.
The entity is committed to participative and inclusive decision-making to generate a positive and lasting social impact, focuses actions on the causes of problems rather than on their effects, and considers that the social development of a community should be based on its members’ dignity, identity and autonomy.
With these values, the foundation carries out a series of community development and environmental protection programmes whose common purpose is the sustainable growth of Oaxaca villages, resulting in a real improvement in the life of their inhabitants.
