Tania Candiani is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Mexico City. A central idea in her body of work is translation, which she interprets through visual, sound, textual, and symbolic languages. Many of her projects consider the universe of sound and the politics of listening as a tool capable of expanding and transforming perceptions, both human and non-human. Feminist practices are a fundamental facet of her work, understood and interpreted as communal and ritual experiences.

Candiani describes sewing as “drawing out loud” and uses textiles as a vessel for memory capable of holding whispers from the land. This textile piece depicts the Mazatec shaman, healer, and poet María Sabina. With her palms raised toward the viewer, the stitched lines convey both fragility and resilience. Through this material language, Candiani anchors Maria Sabina’s spiritual and cultural legacy in bodily form. The world revealed in Maria Sabina’s chants is the same territory evoked in Candiani’s textile portrait. This space is simultaneously real and symbolic, both tactile and sensed, “a world that is far away, nearby, and invisible.” Candiani conceives territory as threads of histories and oral legacies, where magic and reality cannot be distinguished from one another. The strings falling off the piece amplify Maria Sabina’s gestures and presence. Candiani’s textiles resist being reduced to labels such as “craft” or “feminine,” instead embracing the medium’s history and asserting its complexity, power, and capacity for cultural memory.