DesignTO x Stantec Window Gallery

The artist Yana Rzayeva presents a body of work born of continuous displacement, wherein walking becomes a form of writing upon the territory. The exhibition gathers maps, textiles, natural dyes, and records that document her daily traversals through Tlalpan during her residency at Casa Lü in Mexico City. Each piece is the sediment of a presence in transit, the accumulation of fragments of movement, encounter, and perception.

The project extends a sustained inquiry into diaspora, the sense of belonging, and identity as a fabric in perpetual negotiation. Diaspora is understood here as an embodied navigation of space: a gesture of constant orientation, of learning the unknown, of seeking rootedness in that which refuses to fix itself. The walks become method and metaphor. Through them, the artist gathers the trace of a body that questions the ground it treads, that pauses before walls and doorways—structures of exclusion or welcome—and translates that experience into intimate maps where objective geography dissolves.

The materials employed are drawn from the immediate surroundings of Tlalpan: hibiscus, cochineal, marigold, mole, indigo, turmeric, avocado, and sisal fibers. The artist dyes, stitches, and writes with them, allowing the landscape to filter itself literally into the surface of the work. Color does not illustrate the territory; it is the territory metabolized by the hand. The textile weaves and traced lines do not seek to represent the place, but rather to incarnate the experience of passing through it.

The drawings of walls and doors that appear in the series function as symbolic thresholds: they hold the ambivalence of that which shelters and that which separates, of that which grants passage and that which forbids. They are structures that mirror the diasporic condition itself, suspended between the inside and the outside, between the memory of an origin and the construction of a present. The works are, in essence, maps of an ever-provisional orientation. They fix no definitive coordinates, for the ground the artist walks does not settle—it remains in suspense. What endures is the constancy of movement, the inscription of a passage that transforms foreign space into an intimate text, wrought of vegetal pigments, stitches, and instants of full presence.

Sandra Sánchez