Alfredo Valenzuela I Sevilla, (EFE) to put together the “Dos clausuras” collection, which this week has been donated to the Pablo de Olavide University in Seville (UPO).
The collection is made up of fourteen medium-sized works or paintings, seven made by the Peruvian prisoners and many others by the Sevillian nuns, based on photos taken by Pepe Cobo himself inside the Lima prison and inside the Sevillian convent, and on which later the dams and the nuns, respectively, showed their creativity and imagination by embroidering.
The embroideries of these women who, according to Pepe Cobo, “live on the margins of society” were made on various concepts or themes proposed by the gallery owner himself, such as “obedience”, “solitude”, “sacrifice”, “lust” or “kindness”. “, among others.
As the scriptwriter and director of the artistic project that has culminated in the fourteen works that can now be seen in the UPO library, Pepe Cobo visited both the prison and the convent and met with the prisoners and the nuns who intervened with their embroidery on the photographs.
Women’s ability to adapt
The gallery owner has told EFE that in prison he verified “the capacity of women to adapt and normalize an extreme situation; Some of them have gotten married while in prison and have given birth to their children there -they even have a nursery-, and there I assimilated the meaning of hope; The same does not seem to happen in men, once in jail they act in search of mere subsistence, they are only concerned with the immediate, without any projection”.
In the annex prison for women of Chorrillos, inmates with more serious crimes and longer sentences are grouped together, so that the prisoners are serving sentences of between 17 and 25 years and those who took part in this artistic project were between 25 and 45 years, and they always acted “without complaints and with optimism”.
In prison they have a textile workshop whose work helps redeem sentences and Cobo, who is also a contemporary art consultant for companies, foundations and collectors, chose the participants randomly from among those who worked there.
With the nuns of San Leandro, the work was much easier because, as Cobo explained, “they depend on the mother superior”, who gave her the pertinent indications about what was expected of them, in addition to the fact that they were “a group more cohesive and disciplined”.
Pepe Cobo and the Manila shawls
Unlike the overcrowded Peruvian prison, in the Seville convent there were only -the project culminated in 2019- a dozen and a half nuns, of which only three were of Spanish origin and the remaining fifteen from Kenya.
As part of the project, Cobo incorporated a questionnaire for the participants, “as a means of offering their voice to the world beyond the walls of their confinement”, whose written responses were sent anonymously, and in which both prisoners and nuns talked about their life and their experience in the cloister.
These questionnaires collect “the experiences of two social groups about which hardly anything is known, about the life and illusions of these women, about their expression and how they conceive of life,” said Cobo, who chose the UPO as recipient of this donation by the historical figure that gives its name to this Seville university, Pablo de Olavide, a Peruvian politician and intellectual who, as an assistant to the Crown in Seville, undertook important reforms in the city in the 18th century.
The embryo of “Dos clausuras” is to be found in Pepe Cobo’s fondness for Manila shawls and in the exhibition that he did years ago on motifs of these textile pieces, called ‘Flowers of Lurigancho’. EFE