Translators combatting violence against women and femicide
As part of an art-based campaign to bring awareness to the issue of gender-based violence in Mexico and the larger Meso-America region, Las Vanders collective partnered with Respond Crisis Translation to translate important matierals from Spanish to both English and French.
Las Vanders collective is a multicultural feminist organization, based in Mexico, that works to advance the areas of social justice, sustainable feminism, and economic justice. Their particular focus is on providing integral support to migrant and asylum seeking women in Mexico City.
This campaign, which first ran around December 10th, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, focused on gathering reflections from all women in the community and beyond, to create a collective narrative from their perspective. One of the objectives was to create awareness and another to collect proposals to eradicate violence against women in the region, violence such as femicide, transfemicide, lethal violence, disappearance and femicide of migrant women. An important part of the campaign was also to address topics that sometimes can be complex for society to talk about, such as the violence we live in our own lives, or witness in our communities, in a more personal and accessible manner.
The campaign included:
Inviting embroidery artists to reflect, based on their practice, on one of the above mentioned types of violences; the result of their reflections materialized in 4 textile proposals and video tutorials:
How to make a hood and reflect on lethal violence from the periphery,
How to make a t-shirt and use it in public spaces in order to reflect on femicide,
How to make a mouth covering in order to reflect on transfemicides,
How to reflect on Disappearance and Femicide of migrant women through the creation of patches.
Inviting advocates, survivors, organizations and activists to reflect through a video/audio campaign. The video/audio clips, between 1 and 3 minutes each, were shared throughout the campaign and were collected to create an archive of personal and collective reflections and proposals.
By translating all of this information into English and French, the Las Vanders collective expanded their audience reach, and could use social media and translated hashtags, to boost their message.
