A Body That I Used to Know: Saviya Lopes on care, labour and the Feminist Archive

You enter You, Me & Them: A Body That I Used to Know through spaces that appear familiar enough to disarm you. A kitchen crowded with utensils. A table set for company. A quilt held together by countless stitches. These are places and objects that usually recede into the background of daily life. In Saviya Lopes’ hands, they refuse to stay there.

In You, Me & Them, Saviya Lopes turns kitchens, quilts and gatherings into charged sites of memory

Lopes’ exhibition insists that domestic space is never neutral. The kitchen, long framed as a site of warmth and togetherness, carries visible traces of exhaustion. Stained cloths, unfinished tasks and crowded surfaces interrupt any sentimental reading. Care circulates everywhere in these works, but it is not offered as a gentle abstraction. It is shown as labour: repetitive, sustaining, costly.

This clarity did not arrive easily. Lopes has spoken about the friction she once felt when turning intimate spaces into political ones. After encountering feminist theory and artists such as Frida Kahlo, Barbara Kruger and Louise Bourgeois, she feared losing what made these sites survivable. “I almost felt like a trespasser in my own memories,” she says. The tenderness of kitchens and quilts felt threatened by visibility.

What changed was her understanding of tenderness itself. “The tenderness I was trying to protect was just a mere byproduct of invisible and emotional labour,” Lopes explains. To show softness without acknowledging the work behind it, she realised, would mean participating in the same erasure that renders such labour unseen. That recognition deepened through daily conversations with her maternal grandmother about routine and care, conversations that became a turning point in her practice.

Hands recur throughout the exhibition: stitching, feeding, writing, planting. They appear again and again, carrying memory through gesture rather than text. For Lopes, the body itself functions as an archive. This understanding emerged clearly in 2015, when she made a quilt alongside her grandmother as part of her final year project. The work was dismissed as craft, her grandmother dismissed as a non-artist. The experience sharpened Lopes’ resistance to singular authorship. “I see myself as a carrier or a vessel,” she says, “a very temporary custodian, not the origin point.”

Knowledge, in this framework, is collective and intergenerational. Lopes learned textile practices from the women in her family in the same way one acquires a mother tongue. Her hands repeat gestures practised long before her. Authorship lies in how these memories are arranged and translated, not in ownership of their source. The archive the body holds, she insists, does not belong to one person.

This refusal of individual genius extends to how historical figures appear across the paintings. Women such as Harriet Tubman, Angela Davis, Sojourner Truth and others are not depicted at moments of confrontation or spectacle. Instead, they are shown sewing, eating, sitting together, sharing food and conversation. The choice is deliberate and risky. Lopes is aware that stillness is often misread as passivity when applied to Black and Brown women. Yet she insists on its necessity. “I wanted these monumental women to have moments of ease, laughter, and nourishment,” she says. To remember them only through danger or suffering is to reduce them to symbols and deny their humanity.

In these scenes, rest is not retreat. It becomes a form of agency, a refusal of a historical demand that marginalised bodies exist only in motion, labour or pain. Lopes does not diminish what these women did; she expands how they are allowed to be remembered.

Care, however, is never romanticised. Lopes is explicit about the paradox she navigates: honouring care as resistance without reproducing the expectation that women must endlessly give. She recalls making an invoice for emotional labour in 2017, an act that left her unsettled precisely because such labour cannot be adequately measured or repaid. The works register this tension. Fatigue is present. The repetition of stitching and painting mirrors the toll of care itself. Viewers are not allowed to consume the beauty of these scenes without sensing the cost borne by the career.

As you move through the exhibition, your role remains unstable. In some works, you stand back as a witness, confronted with fabric bearing the words “erasure is an old violence.” In others, Lopes breaks the frame. An empty chair, a figure turned outward, invites you to sit, to listen, to belong. You shift between observer, guest and inheritor. None of these positions are fixed.

By the end of A Body That I Used to Know, what lingers is not a single image but a recalibration. Lopes asks what has been allowed to fade into the background of history, and who has been expected to carry it without recognition. Kitchens, quilts, bodies at rest: these are not marginal to the story. They are where it has always been held.

You, Me & Them: A Body That I Used to Know by Saviya Lopes on view at Art & Charlie 

On view till January 2, 2026

Wednesday - Sunday, 11 AM to 8 PM

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