An archive of women who died at the hands of their male partners.
Madrid 1999-2020

The illustrations are mementos, scenes of violence based on the stories of the killed women. The movement of my hand tried to follow the muscle memory of systemic abuse of women and resulted in expressive and naïve gestures. Also, I was looking for aesthetically pleasing drawings to compensate for the horror of the content, which resulted in the childlike style of the plates.

 

I began the research with a list of women murdered in Madrid that I had extracted from the list of murdered women in Spain, available from the Federation of Divorced and Separated Women of Madrid. After reading several cases with the list as a source, I considered the fields that were important to structure the database. Sergio Tombesi built the database, checked that the available data was correct, and investigated what was missing. This database is a table that contains the information of the whole project. In this database I dug into each woman’s history and wrote a description. As I read newspaper articles, I filled in the fields with the data I discovered. At first, each drawing was a simple sketch, a tool to construct the crime scene with the intention of taking a photograph later. But through the act of depicting each scene, the drawings became a way to visualize the information/emotion.

The journey is long and nonlinear. To make the sketch, I started from the victim’s profile taken from the victim’s data. The few initial fields of the table became more sophisticated through the drawing process and, in turn, changed the way I drew. Through the visual and material study, I recognized qualitative issues that were relevant, such as the trigger for the murder. So we inserted new fields into the table. The patterns I saw in the causes of death also influenced the drawing typologies, and I tried to show whether the death was the result of a one-time confrontation or the culmination of a process of constant abuse. On the second pass at the table, I filled in the gaps in each case and wrote a paragraph of five to seven lines that would later become the excerpt of each story. This work took me several months, and over those months, I redrew some of the illustrations.

135 metal plates corresponding to the 135 women murdered by their partners between 1999 and 2020 in the Community of Madrid are placed in the street near the scene of the events.