MEMORIA presents the first solo exhibition in Spain by Sandra Eleta (Panama, 1942), spanning both of its Madrid locations. The series La servidumbre (1975–1989), made between Panama and Spain — and presented in 2017 in the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 — constructs a visual essay in which the colonial trace runs through bodies and spaces alike. Through portraits of domestic workers across two generations, Eleta subverts the inherited colonial and class-bound gaze, revealing its persistence on both sides of the Atlantic.

In this series, the domestic imaginary — historically constructed as a space of subordination — becomes a field of tension in which hierarchies of gender, class, and coloniality operate. The frontality of the compositions, their formal restraint, the gestures, and the intensity of the gazes erode that logic: far from fixing subaltern identities, the women portrayed assert their presence and shift the axis of power within representation.

The ambiguity of location is key: it is difficult to tell whether the images were taken in Panama or Spain. This underscores the continuity of a single visual and social regime, making visible how domestic imaginaries and class structures — deeply shaped by colonial history — reproduce themselves across both contexts.

Eleta understands photography as a space of encounter and negotiation. Her subjects are not passive figures but agents who hold the gaze and articulate forms of silent resistance. The generational difference introduces a telling nuance: where the older women convey containment, the younger ones confront the camera, questioning their social place.

The series reaches its culmination in the image of Romy during the United States invasion of Panama in 1989: the domestic worker appears armed, beneath the painted gaze of her employer’s portrait. The scene distils the political complexity of the project, turning the domestic space into a site of symbolic confrontation where power structures are made legible.

La servidumbre calls on the viewer to recognise histories of struggle inscribed within labour that has been historically rendered invisible, proposing a critical rereading of the domestic imaginary. In this gesture, the portrait becomes a space for the restitution of dignity and the reconfiguration of the gaze.

MEMORIA Carabanchel will also host scheduled screenings of the video installation Sirenata en B (1984) during PHotoEspaña.