In social and political movements, the “crowd” or, in other terms, the conglomerate of people, has often been attributed a homogeneous identity that blurs individual distinctions. Throughout history, official records have categorized and quantified these groups as a faceless, unified entity. These records have been nurtured by unofficial and secretive testimonies stored in domestic and private settings, reinforcing the secondary and peripheral role imposed on domesticity during social revolutions and historical turning points.

Within domestic contexts, social movements are not documented through data, but via subtle shifts in everyday life. When it comes to individuals involved in social movements, domesticity preserves their identities by recording them in a unique manner, remembering them through affectional bonds. For instance, consider the protests advocating for the victims of enforced disappearances in the Colombian armed conflict. It’s not an entire societal body marching for those who are missing, but rather those intimately acquainted with them, who remember through domestic objects like photographs. Society and history, on the other hand, often remember these victims as nameless figures, devoid of a face, or reduced to mere numbers.

In this scenario, domesticity assumes an active role within social movements, documenting the reported victims of eye mutilations (82) and fatalities (23) at the hands of official government forces during the 2021 protests, using a traditionally domestic language like cross-stitch embroidery. This record comprises a repeated pattern of pairs of eyes, altering the concept of singularity by creating a collective representation of a single body with several mutilated eyes.