Andrea De la Peña Aguirre
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Structures of Fear2025
Structures of Fear is my final project for the Geo-Design master’s program at Design Academy Eindhoven. It examines gender-based violence through the intertwined histories of cotton production, colonial power, and patriarchal governance in Latin America—particularly Mexico.

Cotton, a material historically tied to racialised labour and the oppression of women, becomes both symbol and evidence: a fabric that archives stories where fear takes root, and where violence and resilience are interwoven. This project traces how legal frameworks and fear-based social dynamics reinforce each other to control female bodies, revealing how femicide—the killing of women because of their gender—remains largely invisible or inadequately punished.
 Through the lens of cotton’s history, the work exposes the connections between patriarchal systems, colonial economies, and corrupted legal structures that normalise and perpetuate violence—not only against women, but also against people of different genders, social strata, and ideologies.

The multi-media installation and performance integrates the stories of a Mexican artisan group (Cooperativa de Artesanas La Flor de Xochistlahuaca) and women’s collectives searching for missing victims, creating a space where material and testimony confront the structures of fear that sustain gender violence.

Pictures by: David Hernández, Patrick Chiang, Gigi Totaro and myself.












Last update on August 2025