ALMUDENA ROMERO

Leticia (2024) is a photographic work made using living watercress and the process of photosynthesis, in line with my ongoing Family Album series. This body of work explores themes of lineage, memory, and legacy through images of my own family members. For this piece, however, I chose to honour someone who—though not related by blood—was an inseparable part of my family story: my childhood best friend, Leticia.

Leticia and I met at nursery when we were barely three years old and remained side by side throughout our early years. We shared ballet lessons, gymnastics classes, school trips, birthdays, and summer holidays—those defining moments of childhood that, in the days of 35mm film, merited being captured on camera. She appears throughout the pages of our family albums like a constant thread.

We were raised in the same environment and educated at a progressive school in Madrid—an institution that also shaped the minds of leading feminist voices such as Irene Montero. We came from the same background, shared the same values, cultural references, and educational experiences. I knew her family as intimately as my own. We moved through the world together.

Leticia was murdered in November 2023, a victim of violence against women.

This work is a tribute—an act of love, remembrance, and resistance. I wanted to underscore how closely we were raised, because victims of domestic violence are too often scrutinised, as though they had somehow invited or permitted the horror they endured. But violence against women is not the result of personal failure or isolated misfortune—it is a quiet, systemic reality. According to a 2018 analysis by the World Health Organization, one in three women globally experiences gender-based violence in her lifetime.

These tragedies are frequently framed as distant or exceptional—as if they arise from strange, rare relational dynamics. But they are not. They are symptoms of something far more widespread. This is not Leticia’s story alone; it is a structural failing and a collective responsibility. The only difference between Leticia and me is that I was fortunate enough not to have a murderer enter my life—and as the one who remains, I feel the obligation to speak. Violence thrives in silence.

One of my earliest artistic memories involves Leticia. At nursery, we were both fascinated by the boxes of Manley crayons—especially the gold and silver ones, which held a kind of mythical status, echoing the precious materials they imitated. Other unusual colours vanished quickly, snapped up by eager little hands. Leticia and I, already aware of the value of such colours, devised a secret plan: to collect and protect the “special crayons” from careless classmates. We began stealing them, hiding them in our underwear—giggling at our mischief, building a private anthology of colours we considered priceless. Eventually, the growing number of rainbow smudges in our pants gave us away, and we had to confess.

How could I not honour my childhood friend—someone with whom I shared my earliest creative impulses, absurd schemes, and moments of beauty and rebellion? She was my first artistic co-conspirator. A companion in laughter, in care, in formation.
Forever in my heart. Always in my memory.