Two eyes, stitched in colorful thread on a black background, gaze down through plumes of smoke at a fiery orange mass. The yarn frays, as if the flames are licking the fabric. Above are embroidered five names, each the victim or alleged victim of femicide: Lizzbeth, Lauren, Karizmah, رويا (Roya), and نیکا (Nika).
“This is about my sisters’ eyes watching us, and us setting shit on fire for them,” said artist and organizer Nika Zarazvand, speaking about her embroidery entitled QUE ARDA TODO POR TI (BURN IT ALL FOR YOU).
Zarazvand made the piece as part of the “Reimagining Freedom” cohort, a feminist art collective that she and artist-activist Vanesa Suarez convened over the last year. The goal of the cohort, which was run through the activist group Vivan Las Autonomás, was to provide a reflective and healing space for those who have been affected by and are fighting to stop violence against women in Connecticut.
The group met monthly in Fair Haven, where members studied and made protest art and shared stories with one another.
On Saturday evening, five members of the group—Zarazvand, Suarez, Jeniffer Perez-Caraballo, Mary Cyriac, and Yaneth Aleman—shared their work at the Sandbox, part of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven at 70 Audubon St. (In the interest of full transparency, the Arts Paper is the editorially independent arm of the Arts Council).
“Creating artistic avenues for people to be able to express different emotions that might not be expressed through organizing or activism has been a huge part of supporting families,” Zarazvand said. “When you’re supporting a family, they’re not always just wanting to be in the streets to march.”
The need for such a group was apparent from the start. Two days before Suarez and Zarazvand held the cohort’s first meeting last year, workers at the Connecticut Department of Transportation discovered Roya Mohammadi’s body in the West River. Though the police investigation into Mohammadi’s death drags on, advocates believe that the 29-year-old was killed by domestic violence, of which she had repeatedly been a victim and reported to the West Haven Police in the two years leading up to her death.
Immediately, Zarazvand and Suarez’s project felt that much more urgent. As they organized publicly for accountability and transparency regarding the investigation into Mohammadi’s death, they also were building a more intimate and supportive community. For the cohort’s members, this was also personal. Several of them are themselves survivors of abuse or had family members affected by domestic and intimate partner violence.
“We wanted to shift away from crisis response and create an intentional space for us and other women to gather and just be,” Suarez said.
The cohort’s members experimented with a number of different artistic techniques before coming to focus on embroidery. They chose the medium because of its historic usage by feminist movements in Latin America, and in particular by women in the Zapatista movement in the Mexican state of Chiapas. In addition to the textiles, photos taken by Zarazvand of the 2024 International Women’s Day march in Mexico City hung in the gallery.
Like Zarazvand’s piece, conflagration also arises in an embroidery by Perez-Caraballo. The piece, entitled FIRE CROTCH, The Burden Stitch, depicts a singular cone of orange and yellow flame encircled by a tightly wound ring of copper wire.
For Perez-Caraballo, who works as the director of community organizing at She Leads Justice, the piece was meant to express the rage she is forced to temper in her activism.
“My anger is always on display one way or another, but I have to make it really palatable and really pretty,” they said. “When you’re an organizer you walk a fine line between showing the world what you’re angry at and helping other people reach for their anger in really productive ways. You let out enough anger and rage to move a crowd, but not enough to make a crowd afraid of you.”
She chose to make the piece using the burden stitch, an embroidery technique utilizing an array of long, parallel stitches typically used for filling large areas. Though the stitch was named for Elizabeth Burden, a late-19th century British needlework instructor, its double valence felt poetic for Perez-Caraballo.
After finishing and taking a step back, she realized that it looked like a vagina. “Growing up, I remember Lindsay Lohan facing the fire crotch allegations and how I was a teenager and it was coloring my entire world—and how you’re not supposed to even think about vaginas,” she said. “So I went with it.”
While Perez-Caraballo embraced iconography, Cyriac turned to words. In her piece Untitled, black letters on a pale orange background read “so many silences to be broken.” The thread of the first “o” of the phrase unravels, spilling down across the piece.
Beneath, rendered in hauntingly thin, pale script, the text continues: “We must speak / when we are afraid / when we are tired,” like a visual whisper.
Across the gallery, loose threads dangled from the surface of the textiles. Suarez noted that making this work was cathartic, but that much of it was still in progress.
“Healing is a process. It is not just a finish line,” she said. “These pieces are finished works, just like healing,”