Mexico, 1982

 

Adriana Treviño studied Bachelor of Spanish Literature at ITESM Campus Monterrey. She is currently attending the same institution for a Master's Degree in Humanistic Studies. Her academic work has been published in Spain (Plaza and Valdés, 2014). She has participated in various photography workshops in Mexico and abroad with Maggie Steber, Quinton Gordon, Kirsten Lewis, and Mariela Sancari, among others. Since 2016 she has worked as a professional photographer in Monterrey, NL.

Statement of the Jardines en la eterna primavera project:

While the entire world is confronted by a pandemic that forces us to lock ourselves in our homes, I lock myself in my thoughts and confront myself. I take advantage of being away from everyone and everything to reconnect with who I was, who I am, and who I become. As a Mexican woman living in a conservative environment, surrounded by rigid social parameters, my identity merges with the collective. My identity was lost between the duty to be, always defining myself from someone: my parents, my husband, my daughters. What happens when you are locked in for three months with your "ideal" life? At least what you thought was ideal. I go back to the myth of Flora and Zephyr as Ovid tells it in Fastos. Chloris, a nymph of the happy plains, was stolen by Zephyr, spring wind from the west. Flora tells Ovid, “However, he amended his violent act, giving me the name of wife, and I have no complaints whatsoever about my marriage. I enjoy an eternal spring: the year is always smiling, the trees always have leaves, the earth always grasslands. I have a lush garden in the fields that make up my dowry… ”(Ovid, Fastos Book V) What happens when the” eternal spring” loses its charm? 

From this place the garden project was born, where through the flowers I recreate my secret gardens. Places where I can explore any fantasy and desire inside without the need to contain, judge, or repress myself. The flowers are set in scenes where dreamlike landscapes are created which in turn are metaphors for my inner exploration. Each garden is the recreation of emotion, nostalgia for the past, a lost love, a disappointment in the life that I was promised was wonderful. My flowers hide these hidden emotions, they express the frustrations of my daily life and the limitations I face. My flowers, whose delicate, subtle, soft, and feminine image, at first glance, are a metaphor for the discrepancy between the duty of women in the collective consciousness and the individuality of each one. 

Adriana Treviño