For centuries, the women of Ondarroa managed the most important activities of village life. This mural is a tribute to many of those women

By Muraleslian in Ondarroa, Spain.

Muraleslian: For centuries, the women of Ondarroa managed the most important activities of village life. This mural is a tribute to many of those women.

The weaver, methodical and austere is an archetype that refuses to submit, she is living memory. When she weaves, she weaves something more than what we see with the naked eye.

The net’s creation is individual and collective identity… and we already know that collective identity is impossible without memory, it must be maintained by memory. To remember is to make visible, to claim, to repair. And as a weaver in Ondarroa said not long ago: “you have to fix things, you have to dignify them”.

The nets she and many others weave are networks that hold and maintain the community together. In between the threads arise woven tales through which lived stories are narrated.

Sometimes the practice of a trade leads to introspection, silence and remembrance, and other times it leads to words, solidarity and the search for solutions to common problems. When the activity is publicly exposed (when it is practised outdoors), the ability to transmit, the desire to share experience and the importance of the processes are made public.

This mural is also, in part, a legacy in the practice of sharing. Its anchored in this town, in this neighbourhood – as a contribution to the exercise of memory: meticulous hands of women, hands of woman past and present, THE HANDS OF MANY IN THIS TOWN, creating reality and at the same time eroding old archetypes based on oblivion and invisibilization.

It is an invitation to continue threading the true legacy of all those who have not ceased to weave/create/concoct, that is: let us continue to weave together!…