From the streets to museum walls: Artist Fernanda Laguna brings Ni Una Menos to MALBA

With her first major retrospective exhibition, one of Latin America’s most influential feminist artists brings a revolution shaped on the streets onto museum walls. Fernanda Laguna’s Mi Corazón es un Imán, 1992-2025 (“My Heart is a Magnet, 1992-2025”) opened last month at the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA).

Bringing together more than 200 works spanning three decades, the exhibition combines painting, drawing, collage, embroidery, sculpture, installation, video, poetry, novels and personal photographs. Beyond Laguna’s trademark body of visual art – often small-scale paintings employing pastel colour palettes, glitter, found materials and handwritten text – the show places her creations within the wider context of the Ni Una Menos feminist movement.

This is the first time Laguna has presented her multidisciplinary body of work alongside what she terms the “aesthetic-political artifacts” of the movement. Inside MALBA, one of the region’s most acclaimed museums, protest banners, flags and posters trace the rise of Ni Una Menos and its collective outcry against gender violence.

Not one less

In 1995, the poet Susana Chávez coined the phrase “Ni una mujer menos, ni una muerte más” – “Not one woman less, not one more death” – in response to a wave of femicides in Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez. More than a decade on, in 2011, she herself became a victim of femicide. 

Chávez’s words – later shortened to “Ni una menos” – became a rallying cry for a global feminist revolution that exploded onto Argentina’s streets in 2015 and spread across the region.

In the first months of that year, femicides in Argentina rose sharply. Reports estimated that one woman was murdered every 30 hours. The brutal murder of 14-year-old Chiara Páez by her boyfriend in Santa Fe province on May 9, 2015, marked a breaking point.

In response, a group of outraged women – writers, activists, artists and students – formed an anti-gender violence protest collective and sparked massive public outcry. On June 3, 2015, the first Ni Una Menos demonstration drew over 300,000 protesters to Plaza del Congreso in Buenos Aires, with similar marches in 80 cities nationwide. A year later, the movement had gone global.

Laguna joined the demonstrations after the femicide of 16-year-old Lucía Pérez Montero in October 2016. “As a visual artist, I came in to contribute my artistic and graphic skills to the collective, working alongside the other women and sharing ideas,” she said.

For the artist, it was the realisation of a long-held vision. Two decades earlier, Laguna had written about the dream of organising a feminist strike against gender inequality.

“The first time Fernanda came as an organiser was with the idea of the strike,” says her close friend and fellow Ni Una Menos activist Cecilia Palmeiro. “At that moment, the problem was how to develop this struggle. Once you have the bodies on the street, you have the claim in the media – then what do you do with that?”

Laguna’s proposal offered an answer. On October 19, 2016, Argentina held its first National Women’s Strike, drawing more than 250,000 people onto the streets of Buenos Aires.

“It was a wild success,” says Palmeiro, a gender studies professor at New York University’s Buenos Aires campus. “We started receiving calls from women’s organisations all over the world saying, ‘We need to do this together. We need to go international.’”

Using the viral hashtag ‘#NiUnaMenos,’ the movement quickly evolved into a regional and then global mobilisation, with annual demonstrations held each International Women’s Day on March 8.

The seeds of what would eventually become Mi Corazón es un Imán began to take root during the early years of the Ni Una Menos movement.

“After the first strike, we realised we had generated so many beautiful things — art, banners, signs,” recalls Palmeiro. “Fernanda said: ‘All the things we’re putting together, we need to formalise this as an archive.’”

That impulse shapes Mi Corazón es un Imán. In the exhibition’s opening room, seven sections trace the rise of Ni Una Menos through painted T-shirts, banners, photographs, poetry, flyers and feminist iconography championing issues such as femicide, unpaid female labour, the wage gap, LGBTQ+ rights and the fight for safe, legal and free abortion.

For Laguna, that collective dimension is essential. “Everything in Ni Una Menos was a shared effort,” she says. It is an ethos reflected in the MALBA exhibition, which is deemed by curator Miguel A. López to be a “retro-collective,” rather than a conventional retrospective. 

Alongside material from the movement, the show brings together works from Laguna’s long-running collaborative projects, including Belleza y Felicidad (“Beauty and Happiness”), Belleza y Felicidad Fiorito (“Beauty and Happiness Fiorito”), and Mareadas en la Marea (“Dizzy in the Tide”).

Laguna entered the local art scene in 1994 with a solo exhibition at the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center. She later co-founded Belleza y Felicidad with writer Cecilia Pavón – an informal art space and DIY publishing house in Buenos Aires that became a refuge for feminist and LGBTQ artists during Argentina’s 2001 financial crisis. In 2003, the duo expanded the project into Villa Fiorito, where Laguna set up an independent community space and art school grounded in feminist activism.

The Mareadas en la Marea project was born in 2017 from her collaboration with Palmeiro, as the pair set out to build a living archive – a “herstory” – of the Ni Una Menos movement. The project was later published in book form in 2023, but remains, at its core, an extension of the same shared practice.

“The activist work really made us like sisters,” says Palmeiro. “We realised we were a team of two. Sometimes I forget what I did alone or what Fernanda did – we’ve shared that sense of togetherness for years.”

The collective

On opening night at MALBA, the museum’s entry hall buzzed as a record crowd of 2,000 visitors gathered. At its centre, Laguna – cropped bangs, pink bows tied to her high-top trainers – greeted a steady flow of friends and admirers. “It’s like I’m completed by my people. Alone, I am incomplete,” she beamed.

A few days later, speaking over Zoom, the artist returned to that idea of shared creation, of art in communal settings. “When you’re part of a collective, it’s a beautiful thing because you often put aside personal things for the sake of the group,” she said. “But instead of shrinking, it’s like you expand. You expand collectively.”

Throughout her career, Laguna has been drawn to independent spaces that foster this kind of collective action. The MALBA exhibition, she says, is an opportunity to extend the reach of the movement.

“It’s not like everything we produce is for the museum – everything we produce is for the street,” says the artist. “During protests, we use a loudspeaker in the street to reach people; here, the loudspeaker is the museum. We see it as reaching an audience we wouldn’t otherwise reach.”

Bringing Ni Una Menos into a museum is also about transforming formal art spaces, Palmeiro says. “We want to change these spaces from the inside. Being exhibited at MALBA is a victory for the movement. The idea of an international institution like that allows us to build bridges with people from other countries and cultures – to inspire younger generations and open up a dialogue.”

Amid growing threats to women’s rights both in Argentina and globally, expanding the reach and message of the movement is more urgent than ever. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 50,000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or family members in 2024 worldwide – one every 10 minutes.

A recent report shows that femicides are increasing in Argentina, even as Ni Una Menos continues to mobilise. In the first four months of 2025, cases increased by 15 percent compared with the same period in 2024. Meanwhile, President Javier Milei’s cuts to gender-focused policies have reduced funding for programmes supporting survivors of gender-based violence.

Against that backdrop, Mi Corazón es un Imán serves as a fresh reminder of ongoing feminist resistance rooted in collective action. “This exhibition demands collective thinking at a moment in which we are in a local and global political situation marked by fragmentation, violence, and total precarity,” says López, the curator. “There is a desire to regenerate the social fabric from intimacy, from being together.”

The last of the seven exhibition sections – 'Unir las luchas es la tarea,' (“Uniting the Struggles is the Task) – makes that idea explicit. Headscarves demanding women’s rights hang alongside anti-fascist banners, photographs of migrant protests, T-shirts demanding prison reform,  environmental manifestos. 

For Laguna, the message is clear: collective action must serve as a bridge across movements, drawing strength from unity. “Instead of having 20 different fronts of struggle, you have one united front,” she says. “Uniting all the struggles – this is how we overcome.”

“Feminist collectives need to engage in a process of imagination, to have an idea, a dream – what you might call a vision – to work from and then carry it out in every imaginable way,” she says. “The great thing about forming collectives is that each person brings an idea, and there is no idea that is too outlandish; all ideas can be developed and implemented when done collectively. The way out is collective.”