In 2025, it will be 40 years since the Érguete Association was founded. The idea for it came from a group of mothers who were united by a common bond: at least one of their children was affected by drug addiction. This exhibition highlights the role of a generation of women who transformed their motherhood into a political tool to strengthen their self-esteem and build networks of solidarity, trust and action in a society that stigmatized them for their fight against drug addiction.

The mothers of Érguete discovered that the association provided them with a way to redefine their motherhood, considered back then as the bedrock of feminine identity which relegated women to the roles of housewives and wives. The suffering and trauma they had experienced in the domestic sphere boosted their ability to connect with and transform the public sphere from the perspective of their maternal condition. During the 1980s and 1990s, they managed to change public opinion, promote reforms in the rule of law and exert a major influence on the political and social perception of women, as well as recognition of their roles as mothers and housewives. Although the Érguete Association was not born with a strictly feminist position, it strengthened and transformed the role of women in society.

The entry of drugs into Spain along the Galician coasts in the early 1980s was favored by the absence of a legal framework to penalize it. Drug traffickers took advantage of this loophole to restructure tobacco smuggling networks, a flourishing business in the region, into drug trafficking routes. In this context, the mothers of Érguete faced a completely unknown situation, which led them to develop strategies and tools to combat a phenomenon that was affecting young people, many of whom did not manage to survive.

The mothers of the so-called “lost generation” reacted to the State’s lack of action and began to organize themselves in the first half of the 1980s to draw attention to their situation. They realized these were not just isolated cases that affected them alone, so they decided to publicize the problems they faced by providing real names and surnames, shunning anonymity and generating empathy in a society that remained indifferent. “Crazy” or “terrorists” were some of the epithets used in attempts to discredit them. However, these women made use of public spaces as stages for solidarity and action in order to shed light on an open secret. This demonstration of their pain and trauma represented a challenge to the State’s operation, and it countered by taking group legal actions that opened cracks in the drug trafficking rings in Galicia.

In their fight against drugs, the mothers expanded the sphere of their protest action with demonstrations and performances in quite unconventional spaces. They stood in front of the pazo [the mansion] of the drug trafficker Laureano Oubiña, protested at fishing ports to point the finger at those who were transporting cocaine, drew attention to their situation by means of a songbook and demonstrated in front of bars and supermarkets where narcotics were sold. They used their bodies and voices to embody, interpret and reveal everything that had been hidden until then.

Their protests happened in a context of economic crisis and unemployment in Galicia which coincided with a Transition towards a State of participation, rights and loosening restraints. This widened the generational gap between parents, raised under the Franco regime, and their children, who reached adulthood in democracy. Thus, when the mothers went out into the streets, they were also challenging the limitations imposed by an education and a culture built in a dictatorship, which had suppressed the rule of law, restricted civil society’s participation in politics and censored the feminist struggle as a collective action.

Archival material from the Érguete Association is displayed throughout the exhibition, together with the work of eleven artists who worked on the stigmatization of both women and sick bodies, addressing these problems from different perspectives and visual languages.

Anna Turbau researched Galicia’s rural situation between 1975 and 1979, until police pressure forced her to return to Catalonia. According to the artist: “I came across the Galician situation almost by chance. It was the early 1970s. Popular movements were emerging with a fervor that coincided with my own (…). My job was very clear: to break through the barriers of caciquism, censorship and police repression.” The photographer managed to gain access to the Conxo Hospital, in Santiago de Compostela, a center that operated between 1885 and 1953, to photograph women who did not fit into the canons of the patriarchal society of the time, which considered them “mentally weak.” These women were diagnosed using terms such as “hysterical insanity,” “genital insanity,” “melancholic psychosis” or “violent passions,” thus pathologizing their behavior and reducing their individuality to a medical problem.

While she was exploring female stigmatization, Turbau also photographed shellfish gatherers, who were workers in one of the Galician economy’s key fishing activities. These women have played a fundamental role in the entire production process —fishing, processing, and selling— and have fought to be recognized within the fishermen’s guilds, historically dominated by men.

Elvira Martínez Villa signs her works with the surnames of her mother and grandmother. From Vigo, she played an active part in the organization of Estampa Popular Gallega, an anti-Franco movement that sought to use art to awaken a critical and social conscience during the dictatorship. The artist has always highlighted the courage of the few women who, like her, entered into such an extensive political endeavor through artistic creation. As she herself explains, “the prints were not intended for the market, but to convey a message of resistance”.

Bea Rey, for her part, was an artist on the outside of the promotional circuits of her time, more interested in painting than in public notice. She has participated in artistic movements in Galicia, being part of the Sisga group, and she was also linked to the Puerta del Sol group in Madrid and collaborated with Estampa Popular Gallega. Her canvases reflect the dystopias and the alienation of the society of her time. Her work Ciudadano soñador (1973), expresses an evolution towards an inner exile, as she began to explore the world through herself, generating transpositions and doubles with which to investigate the common human experience.

In the Close-Upseries (2004), Ana Vieira works with concave and convex mirrors to explore the dichotomy between showing and hiding. The series reflects on the distortion of a suffocating situation for women in the domestic sphere, a place that has historically reduced their participation in the public sphere. The mothers of Érguete were and are, for the most part, housewives. The home became for them a stage where some of them had to hide their political activities, others waited to carry out their duties before mobilizing and others still counted on the complicity of their environment to do so.

There is a type of criticism in 42 vértebras a ras del suelo (1993) by Maribel Domènech, who experiments with x-rays of her own body backlit by blue neon. Domènech humanizes medical and scientific discourses, transporting them to an intimate and personal realm, a strategy similar to that of the mothers who fought against the stigma and marginalization of their children, who were treated as criminals instead of sick people.

Cecilia Barriga portrays this situation in her documentary Ni locas, ni terroristas (2005), where she follows the daily life of a group of mothers and extends the story to fathers and siblings, revealing family processes that often remain hidden and untold.

Jana Leo and Javier Codesal belong to the generation of the AIDS crisis, a disease deeply marked by social rejection. In Estigmas fatales (1994), Leo writes the word “AIDS” on her forehead with a razor. The three photographs represent three women from different social classes, alluding to a disease that makes no distinctions, even though public opinion encouraged the stigma that only drug addicts and gay men suffered from it. No one warned that a woman could suffer from AIDS. For his part, Codesal, in DÍAS de SIDA (1996), invites the spectator to interact with an AIDS patient through their gaze, challenging the predominant idea in the nineties that physical contact with HIV-positive people should be avoided, a fear that led to the isolation of those who had the disease.

In her performance Álbum Portátil (1995), Eugènia Balcells sets out to explore collective memory and female identity through a symbolic gesture of recognition and gratitude. The artist reclaims the presence of all women in her own existence, from those who stood out in history to those who have remained anonymous. By means of this performative action, she not only honors women of the past and present, but also challenges the limits of traditional representation, turning her own body into a space of resistance and memory. Her speech emphasizes the importance of recognition and the transmission of knowledge between generations, in a context in which many female voices in history have been silenced or marginalized.

In this dialogue with women’s legacies, Paula Santomé connects with the mothers of Érguete, whom she reinterprets using mythology: the wolf mother showing her sharp teeth. Here, motherhood, as narrated by the artist, moves away from tender and gentle stereotypes to take on a fierce and untamed form, ready for anything. Through the symbolism of classical Greek tradition, Santomé recovers the voice of these women to exalt their struggles. In one of her pieces, the image of a broken chain symbolizes freedom, while also evoking the iconic scene of Carmen Avendaño breaking into Pazo de Baión, the former mansion of the drug baron Laureano Oubiña.

Alejandra Pombo Su’s work revolves around the scream in relation to specific spaces and contexts. On this occasion, she will prepare a performance programmed for April exploring circumstances and situations in connection with the exhibition’s themes.

The exhibition is completed with a selection of archive material from the Association, from family albums and from the mothers’ homes. This kind of documentation pricks the collective social memory, and its purpose is not to focus on past events that are over, but to be related to other works of art crystallizing the political and social context that motivated the Association’s struggle. Accordingly, the exhibition puts banners, a songbook, photographs and press material into dialogue with works by artists from different generations. With these materials we seek to challenge the rhetoric of the body and the present-day political imagination. As Nelly Richard points out in relation to the archive material: “Reviewing these materials from the past-present, therefore, is to foster multiple readings and frictions at a crossroads between art, subjectivity, social discourse, culture and institutions”.