Friday Anxiety is a textile book that was born in August 2022, with scraps of upholstery fabrics.

It was born on a Friday. I was in a middle of a panic attack. That time I was working on my first art show and we were in the middle of the hurricane season.

Since 2017, with the passage of Hurricane Maria through Puerto Rico, we have suffered a dramatic rise in the cost of living in our country. Not only because it is an island, which depends almost entirely on the arrival of American ships that transport 85% of the food consumed and the supplies necessary to operate businesses and government, but also because of the local administration that has been economically strangling the country, without looking for alternatives to reduce the effects of climate change.

In Puerto Rico, alternative energy projects have been boycotted and it is increasingly difficult to obtain government land for agroecological crops. The increasingly expensive food, skyrocketing price of gasoline and electricity, based on carbon emissions, are problems of the first order for the current population.

This book summarizes my stress at the rise in gasoline prices and the high cost of electricity, which was privatized in Puerto Rico in 2020 with the US-Canadian consortium, LUMA Energy.

This situation creates emotional and mental crises. Drawing and sewing this episode on Friday helped me make visible what is experienced daily in Puerto Rico and my way of ‘breathing’, a panic attack and managing the stress of living in a collapsed country. — Artist Gloribel Delgado Esquilín on Ansiedad de viernes