PACHA MANAS
A project by Marina Alegre & Margherita Isola
Thanks to the support of the Goethe Institut of São Paulo.
2020 > 2022
Pacha Manas addresses abortion and its criminalisation. Although abortion shapes the lives of countless women around the world, speaking about it becomes especially urgent in Brazil, where it remains criminalised and heavily stigmatised.
Beginning from the autobiographical experiences of their own abortions, Margherita and Marina confront the violence through which abortion is silenced and censored. Through encounters with comrades, women, and medicinal plants, they collectivise wounds, struggles, hopes, and forms of knowledge, transforming personal experiences into shared processes of care and resistance.
The project creates spaces for dialogue, solidarity, and mutual support, while fostering practices of resilience, healing, and collective care.
Inspired by the cyclical nature of life, Pacha Manas unfolded through a series of itinerant circles bringing together women, plants, and embroidery, alongside the collaborative creation of a hanging garden and a publication
Embroidery is approached as a regenerative collective practice: while conversations unfold, hands continue sewing, allowing gestures, memories, and stories to guide the dialogue.
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These circles took place across São Paulo with women encountered in public spaces, and later expanded online during the pandemic through collaborations with the Goethe-Institut and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. The online gatherings included contributions from Cristina Takua, Eliana Rodriguez, Cleone Santos, and Andrea Alves.
Pacha Manas also took the form of an installation honouring victims of unsafe and illegal abortions — women who lost their lives after being denied fundamental rights to healthcare and bodily autonomy. To remember them, we created a hanging garden on the courtyard wall of the Goethe-Institut using vulva-shaped planting bags filled with traditional abortifacient plants such as rue, São Caetano melon, pennyroyal, parsley, and others.
Pacha Manas is also a book that gathers texts with multiple perspectives written by several Brazilian and non-Brazilian women, including the two artists. The book, edited by Editora Funilaria, invites reflection on abortion, patriarchy, reproductive autonomy, care and traditional knowledge, among other topics.
The publication has been presented as a participatory reading, sharing extracts of the book, and interwoven the reading with a collective tembroidery & talk.
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Reading-performance tour:
8 December 2022- Goethe Institut, São Paulo
21 December 2022 - Funarte, São Paulo
27 January 2023 - Fundación Entredos, Madrid
Pacha Manas is one of the projects hosted by the Biennial Women in the Visual Arts.
