Calvillo, Aguascalientes → Palacio Municipal de Aguascalientes April May, during the Feria de San Marcos Photographic and textile project.
Las Deshiladoras is a collaborative photographic and textile project developed in Calvillo, Aguascalientes, and presented publicly at the Palacio Municipal de Aguascalientes during the Feria de San Marcos, one of Mexico’s most significant civic and cultural gatherings.
The project brings together the work of Marcos Lutyens with a group of master deshiladoras—women whose meticulous textile practice embodies generations of embodied knowledge, discipline, and cultural continuity. Working closely with these artisans, Lutyens produced a series of 20 photographic works focusing on the intense, almost meditative precision of deshilado. Shot with minimal depth of field, the images foreground hands, threads, and gestures, emphasizing the temporal and spatial exactitude required by the craft. Shamanic drum Mario Petriccione (Fondazione Merz)
Central to the project was a hypnotic induction offered to the participating deshiladoras, designed to help liberate them from inherited mental and design schemas traditionally associated with the practice. This process opened space for intuitive variation, personal memory, and creative departure, allowing new formal expressions to emerge while remaining grounded in technical mastery. The resulting textile works—created specifically for the exhibition—exist in direct dialogue with the photographs, positioning deshilado as both a living tradition and an evolving artistic language.
Installed within the civic architecture of the Palacio Municipal, the exhibition placed this intimate, domestic labor into a public, communal context, asserting its cultural, psychological, and artistic significance during a moment of heightened public gathering.
Las Deshiladoras was realized with the support and collaboration of Geraldine de la Serna and Octavio Ozuna, and features the work of deshiladoras from Calvillo, including Esther Hernández López, Alicia Martínez Ruiz, Ma. Inés Loera Velasco, Valeria Mariel Macías García, Josefina García Romo, Ma. Auxilio Martínez González, Ma. Guadalupe López de Lara, and María Guadalupe Ruiz López.