Hannelore Grosser

Hannelore Grosser, 1975 Valparaíso, Chile.

Medicine woman, visual artist, clinical art therapist and activist.

She studied art and philosophy at the University of Concepción. She specialized in art therapy at the University of Chile, and her experience led her to delve deeper into clinical areas: mental health, child and adolescent rehabilitation, inclusion, and oncology.

She has exhibited her graphic and visual work in Chile and abroad.

Her artistic research seeks to articulate and integrate 30 years of work related to feminine spirituality, connection with nature, shamanic journeys, ancestral medicine, and the arts.

She currently works in Hualpén and the mouth of the Biobío River using performance, textile art, and poetry along the axes of Art-Nature-Spirituality and Body-Territory-Ecofeminism with the aim of bringing balance, healing, and well-being to the community in the territory she inhabits.

The Origin (NAT Art Residence - 05/2025)

My creative process during the NAT Residency begins with the intimate and emotional experience of the paleolithics paintings in the caves of Cantabria that awakened in me ancestral and soulful memories related to feminine ceremonies, rituals of passage and archaic fertility prayers. They also raised questions about the origin of art, the origin of life, and the origin of the human being.

THE ORIGIN addresses and reviews my own cycles, other existences I have remembered and integrated, and profound spiritual experiences that I have understood at different levels over the years.

Similarly, this proposal connects with imaginaries I created almost 30 years ago. It reminds me of the concepts of “origin myth” and “eternal return” mentioned by Mircea Eliade. I believe that each symbolic death has generated a new beginning, a new opportunity to live, a new way of looking at my story and following my path. This journey inward, or into the world below, that the cave itself invites, has been an encounter with myself, and my work embodies all of that.

The project consists of three textile elements that I created: I AM VULVA PORTAL is a red fabric with white embroidered text that proclaims the certainty of who I feel I am and who I have become; THE SEED is a red fabric object embroidered with white wool that represents the bearer of ancestral memory with all the information about who we are; and THE UMBILICAL CORD is a crocheted piece made with red wool that represents the connection to the land we inhabit, allowing us to remember where we come from and not forget where we are going.

I also include four ILLUSTRATIONS where I imagine and plan, as a summary, the most important parts of the action I later carried out at El Sable Beach in Tagle. Finally, the PERFORMANCE, where I evoke my life story as an endless cycle of birth, exploration, discovery, and death. Movement as the essence of life, and transformation as a path in art. From this latest work, I have selected some images that I try to make converse with the initial poem, a text that inspires and describes my journey during this residency.

Click on the images for full view

The Performance

I am vulva portal

Wet dancing vulva
I open my lips to let out my voice.

I born again

I appear through

my own vulva portal

to become, in own way,

free and fragile

sun seed

eye vision

vegetal orgasm

root woman.

I collect element on the beach

to make talismans

objects of power,
I create altars with sacred deities
I sing and pray to them.

My spirit comes out of my chest with strength
to give life
explosion of energy

constant flow

movement

menstrual cycle.

Wet dancing vulva
l open my lips to let out my voice.

Moans and screams

whispers in my ear

long and plesurables orgasm

strengthen my heart

expand my field.

Fusion with everything around it
infinite silence that contains and calms
visions of an interconnected network of beings.

l am the womb

I am the vulva
I am strength

I am spirit
I transform into everything and nothing
I become complete and empty.

l am vulva portal
woman who gives her body to give life,

I am vulva portal