Sewing entered Nia de Indias’ practice only recently, radically transforming the artist’s relationship with textiles. Learning to use a sewing machine opened an experimental territory where fragments of fabric, color, and pattern begin to converse intuitively. Each work starts with image research across digital archives and evolves through collage-like material decisions made in the act of making, allowing compositions to slowly emerge through memory, gesture, and desire.

A key visual reference for the series is the photographic archive of Alfredo Molina La Hitte, a prominent Chilean portrait photographer of the mid-twentieth century known for carefully staged studio portraits in which pose, costume, and theatricality shaped ideals of elegance and sophistication. Nia de Indias revisits these images through a contemporary queer lens, shifting historical codes of masculinity toward new forms of intimacy, affection, and longing.

“I chose to title most of the works with male names to make explicit the identity of the figures portrayed. At its core, this exhibition traces the journey of a man who chooses to embody drag and, through that act of self-recognition, find love.” — Nia de Indias