El Peso de mis Vecinas

El Peso de Mis Vecinas is an artistic research project that engages with women whose lives are shaped by cross-border movement and informal labour, particularly in relation to practices of carrying goods across borders.

The project explores how these forms of labour—often invisible, precarious, and physically demanding—produce specific conditions of proximity, where relationships are formed through shared routes, risks, and experiences.

The notion of “weight” operates both literally and metaphorically: referring to the physical burden of transported goods, as well as the emotional, social, and political dimensions carried by those who perform this labour.

Through the project, these experiences are articulated not only through speech but through singing, allowing personal and collective narratives to emerge in embodied and rhythmic forms.

Developed through close engagement with these contexts, the project also reflects on the position of the artist, for whom hosting becomes a process of learning—shaped by existing forms of care, exchange, and mutual support.

The project builds on earlier research into the circulation and meaning of objects across borders, particularly Objects and Desires, which explores value and desire through objects moving between Spain and Morocco.

Process

The project unfolds through periods of cohabitation developed in relation to these cross-border dynamics.

Living alongside the participants, the artist enters existing networks of relation shaped by movement, labour, and survival. These shared conditions create a space of proximity in which experiences are exchanged not only through conversation, but through everyday coexistence.

In parallel, cooking sessions developed in collaboration with Fundació Comtal created additional spaces of encounter with Moroccan women living in Barcelona, where practices of sharing, care, and daily exchange became part of the project’s methodology.

Through listening, conversation, and collective singing, participants articulate fragments of their lived experience. Singing becomes a central method, allowing experiences to be expressed through rhythm, repetition, and breath, beyond purely verbal language.

These voices are not stabilised into fixed accounts, but remain multiple, embodied, and in transformation.

In this context, hosting is not imposed but learned: it emerges through the negotiation of presence, trust, and proximity within already existing forms of exchange, support, and interdependence.

Forms

The research is translated into performative, visual, and narrative forms:

Performance: Las voces de mis vecinas stages fragments of the collected voices through singing, performative narration, and vocal composition

Drawings: series of 18 white-on-black ink drawings that translate the shared experiences into visual forms, condensing gestures, movements, and emotional states into symbolic compositions

Animation documentary (12 min): an unpublished short film structured as a musical composition, in which the songs and drawings developed during the research become the primary narrative material.

Notebook: a working and narrative space in which fragments of text, reflections, and observations are gathered, tracing the development of the project and its encounters

Publication: structured through the format of recipes, bringing together songs, writings, and narratives as scores for transmission. Developed through the encounters, it reconfigures lived experiences into instructional and poetic forms, articulating a multiplicity of voices and their resonance.

These forms do not document the encounters directly, but re-articulate them across different media: voice, image, and writing; allowing experiences to remain open, embodied, and in transformation.

Context

The project was developed in dialogue with women engaged in cross-border practices of carrying goods, forming neighbourhood relations that extend beyond fixed geographic boundaries.

It forms part of a broader inquiry into how voice constructs relational space, and how neighbourhood can be understood as a network of lived connections shaped by movement, labour, and shared conditions.

The work was presented in different contexts, including exhibitions and performances at Piramidón art center, MACBA, Festival Errant, the Museu de Sant Pol de Mar, and internationally at 365 Gallery in Viena.

The project received support from the Generalitat de Catalunya and the PEI Program MACBA.

Credits

Concept and direction: Christina Schultz

Developed in collaboration with: Nadia, Aisha, Fatima, Zhor, Sahra, Mileda, Hafeda, Regina, Stti

In collaboration with: Fundació Comtal, La Capella Barcelona Producció

Support

The investigation of this project was made possible by the Barcelona Producció 2017/2018 grant and the PEI study program by MACBA.

The project was further supported by Pau Cata, as well as through residencies and collaborations with CeRRCa, Jiwar Creació i Societat, Le18 in Marrakech, the Institut Ramon Llull, and Nau Côclea.

The presentation of the project in form of a cooking workshop at Fundación Comtal.

The performance at 365, curated by Dr. Lena Freimüller in Viena.

Portrait of Luiza

In October the border was closed on Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the atipical traffic. Since I left, it is only open two days a week. Nadias, Hafedas and Luizas despair is overcome by cooking, singing and talking about not much.

This is how a Moroccan wedding looks from the backside. The garage is the kitchen and the kitchen where men will eat as invisible as possible. Stti and Fatima are between 60 and 80, neither of them knows her exact age, and manage the 28 shared plates going out for the guests. Fatima is the groom’s grandmother and Stti the neighbor. It’s a all women run heavy work which needs a lot of collaboration from neighbor to neighbor.

Nadia, contrabandista, she doesn’t like the word ‘porteadora’, gets up at 2h30 in the morning to wait sometimes 5 hours in the cue at the Melilla border until the door opens. When she comes back for lunch with a big smile on her face for her three small children and also for me, she has already spent about 14 hours awake.

Drawing

The day I waited outside of the door of the barrio chino for Nadia to come out, I spend one morning together with Syrian refugees who waited anxiously for the gate to open and maybe take a chance to blend in with all the people, who once orderly in a cue, stream out like overfloating water, rolling or carrying their huge **bultos ** as fast as possible. I wouldn’t imagine at that point that I would see them all again the last day I decided to spend in a hotel instead of staying at Luiza’s. Here is Samira having a break from her multiple brothers, sisters and cousins and their fathers waiting here in Nador to follow their mothers who managed to slip through the Moroccan guards mostly disguised as Porteadoras. Morocco won’t let them pass to seek help at the CETI, the governmental center for war refugees.

Both of the travels were made by boat, minimum 25 timeless hours floating slowly and solemnly through a worldly waters, whose only frontiers were different telephone companies. The visit ended with the same women sharing the cabin with me who during my stay in Nador also shared her life with me.