Diarias*/Communities of Care is a participatory cultural interventionconceived by Lorena Wolffer in order to register and make the reality of women’s and trans* person’s communities of care visible during confinement and the pandemic, and also operates as a means of being aware of one another during these times from a collective ethics of care.
The intervention begins with an open invitation to a woman or a trans* person from Mexico or abroad, asking them to assemble the Diaria for a week, together with six members from their affective community—family members, friends and/or colleagues, also women or trans* persons. The general premise is for each participant to produce the entry for one day of the week with a written, photographic, video and/or drawn account of what they did, thought and felt on that day. However, the invitation is only a point of departure, the idea is that each participant makes the project their own, modelling it as they each choose.
The Diarias produced so far are all different: some have seven entries composed by seven different persons, others have only one (which may refer to one day or an entire week), and a few start with an introduction written by the Diaria coordinator. The people who make up each Diaria don’t necessarily live in the same city or country and, so far, there are participations from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Mexico, the United States. Their texts are in Spanish, English, Italian, and Portuguese, and will not be translated in order to preserve them exactly as they were sent.
* Diarias is diaries in feminine, a noun that doesn’t actually exist in Spanish.