De tu Puño y Letra (By Your Own Hand)
De tu Puño y Letra (By Your Own Hand)
Suzanne Lacy
2015
Quito, Ecuador
Social practice
Riaño-Alcalá, Pilar. "Encounters with Memory and Mourning: Public Art as Collective Pedagogy of Reconciliation." In Public Acts: Disruptive Readings on Making Curriculum Public, edited by Ibanez-Carrasco, Francisco and Erica Meiners, 237–261. New York: Routledge, 2004. Routledge.
De tu Puño y Letra (By Your Own Hand) is a large-scale, participatory social practice project executed in the Plaza Belmont (Quinto, Ecuador). The project builds on the earlier South American campaign, Carta de Mujeres (Women's Letters), in which 10,000 Ecuadorian women wrote testimonials on their experiences of violence. Lacy worked with artists, educators, feminist groups and the LGBTQIA+ community in Quito to discuss constructions of masculinity and eradicating gender-based violence. The project is an example of memory activism through creating a space to bear witness to women's experiences and first-hand accounts of violence and to work through accountability and change.