Gozadera festivity and loudness
As the exhibition occurs we overtake a corner of the space with colorful lights, music and paint. On our backs and through our hands and mouths we bring our sounds, chaos, languages, and stories to reclaim and create a space, a space that is ours, our land.
La Gozadera, was the seed of La Dekoloniala!. This was an intervention/invention at a group exhibition in 2019 where Milagros Bedoya, also part of La Dekoloniala! And me made a live painting and invited Princess Jimenez Beltre to perform her spoken word The myth of the good immigrant”
After that we have worked following the same path twice, once for the exhibition “Min Kropp Min val” (my body my decision) that highlighted the International Safe aboriton day, here we created a week long process mural with Sarai Alvarez, and Princess performed her spoken word piece, an homage to Esperancita and victims of the criminalization of abortion and forced sterilizations.
Our latest intervention was Pater Familias and Fatherland at the streamed exhibition Domestic/Pandemic/Systemic where we performed together in order to highlight institutional violence against women.
In all of our projects we take different roles, we are artists, subjects, organizers and communicators, voices and listeners, creating a situation that flows organically, loudly overtaking the spaces and creating the sense of community. We prioritize working with people from the global south or with connection with abya yala.
Context is so important because we are in places where we are not meant to be as subjects, or creators of knowledge. The world is not designed for us to do that, and the spaces are created intentionally to exclude us . We will always be the objects, we always will be the ones in the ethnographic museum, we will never be the subjects. We will never be considered the ones creating knowledge, as creating art, as having something to say. And I think that space, specially from a colonial perspective, is not something abstract, is something concrete, is both things at the same time, since the very very beginning, the key, the central and the heart of not only la Dekoloniala!, but us; is space, everything about us is about space.
I
Toneando1 to crack the master´s house:
collective practices, antiracism, and feminisms from the global south
With the colonization process, several practices were either forbidden, erased, or kept hidden to be instrumentalized and expropriated by colonizers. This process went in parallel with the genocide of indigenous afro communities and the dehumanization of the colonized bodies.
How to resist without having the power?
Yuderkys Espinoza expands on the method proposed by John Holloway consisting in creating cracks, fractures, and fissures inside the hegemonic system, inside the walls of the master´s house. This is a un activity in practice and in theory, is a desperate effort to break through.
Body movement is a form of knowledge preservation, knowledge transmission, and resistance. The non-verbal is protected in this way. They continue to exist in the bodies and memory of people when they are prohibited and criminalized. Body movement documents/archives people's lives, and collective memory, it is difficult to erase them.
As an example, Jessica Ordoñez who is a Mexican multidisciplinary dancer based in the Dominican Republic researches the traces of African heritage kept in the pelvic movement of dances practiced by communities living in Abya Yala4, resisting and adapting to different contexts. Her research-practice platform is called Waistline Magic5 and it looks to create bridges between people who have experienced processes of invisibility, marginalization, and structural discrimination in order to consciously find and use various resistance tools that can create changes in communities. Her project also seeks to create spaces for the exploration of movement focused on the pelvis by offering theoretical-practical dance workshops.
How this knowledge was preserved hidden in the body and non-verbal practices?
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui argues that important knowledge has survived because it was not detected by the colonizer forces, as it existed within the education directed towards women – selected elite women, to be precise. The political power of this knowledge was kept in the hands of women through highly complex artistic expressions such as textiles, an intricate theoretical and practical knowledge of high complexity as it is a form of serial mathematics where numeric series are combined in harmony.
Movement is a form of preservation and transmission of knowledge; non-verbal language is kept in the body and can survive and then be transmitted, resisting criminalization.
___
[3) ‘Tonear’ is slang used in Peru to refer to the act of partying
[4] Abya Yala refers to what is called the American continent (South-, Central-, and North America). Abya Yala is a term that reclaims indigenous communities’ self-determination and governance beyond the notions and geopolitical borders of the nation-states brought by the conquerors. This term questions (denies) the idea of a ‘New World’ that was discovered and civilized, later called America.
[5] Instagram: @waistlinemagic.mx
Gozadera festivity and loudness 8
As the exhibition goes on, we take over a corner of the space with colorful lights, music and paint. On our backs and through our hands and mouths we bring our sounds, chaos, languages, and stories to reclaim and create a space, a space that is ours, our land.
La Gozadera was the seed of La Dekoloniala!. It was an intervention/invention at a group exhibition in 2019, where Milagros Bedoya, also part of La Dekoloniala! and I made a live painting and invited Princess Jimenez Beltre to perform her spoken word piece ‘The myth of the good immigrant’.
Since then we have worked following the same path twice: once for the exhibition ‘Min kropp mitt val’ (my body my choice) which highlighted International Safe Abortion Day, where we created a week-long process mural with Sarai Alvarez, and Princess performed her spoken word piece, an homage to Esperancita and victims of the criminalization of abortion and forced sterilizations.
Our latest intervention was Pater Familias and Fatherland at the streamed exhibition ‘Domestic/Pandemic/Systemic’, where we performed together in order to highlight institutional violence against women.
We take on different roles in all of our projects, we are artists, subjects, organizers and communicators, voices and listeners, creating a situation that flows organically, loudly overtaking the spaces and creating the sense of community. We prioritize working with people from the Global South or with a connection with Abya Yala.
Context is so important because we are in places where we are not meant to be as subjects, or creators of knowledge. The world is not designed for us to do that, and the spaces are created to intentionally exclude us. We will always be the objects; we always will be the ones in the ethnographic museum; we will never be the subjects. We will never be considered the ones creating knowledge, as creating art, as having something to say. And I think that space, especially from a colonial perspective, is not something abstract or something concrete, it is both things at the same time, since the very very beginning, the key, the center and the heart of not only la Dekoloniala!, but us; space, everything about us is about space.
___________
[8] https://kultwatch.se/la-gozadera-festivity-resilience-and-loudness/
I-Toneando to crack the master's house
Collective experiences, bodies resisting violence
Like most cities in Latin America, Lima is a post-war city. Violence has increased after twenty years of internal conflict from 1980–2000, pervading all aspects of life. Crimes like feminicide have grown crueler. The aesthetics that we have developed broadly gather the kinds of imagery that our generation grew up with, in the media and our own life experiences of death and violated bodies. Now, most predominantly, the bodies of women.
In my effort to create these rituals and to connect them with the exposedness of women and women's bodies in today’s Peru, I have once again looked to the past – to explore and understand the history of women’s position and role in our native communities. Feminisms from the Global South are rooted in the Indigenous sense of community, with principles of reciprocity and collective responsibility going before and beyond the construction of nation-states. The theory and discourse of these sorts of feminisms stem from practice. This knowledge has its own history, originating long before the first wave of First World feminism. Acknowledging decolonial feminism implies understanding that women have always had an active role in Indigenous communities, a role deeply connected to the sustainability of life and the conservation of the environment and society through the reproduction of cultural practices related to health care, education, and food. This role has been deeply connected to the struggle for the land, for reclaiming and creating spaces after the collective trauma of colonization. In this sense, decolonial feminist Yuderkis Espinosa Miñoso[6] argues for decolonial feminism as a radical emancipatory project, challenging the universalism of Eurocentric feminisms and promises of the future: ‘In an open confrontation with this story, I see the need to produce a critique within the feminist and sexual liberation program that questions the idea of a historical journey on an ascending scale, in which every task, custom, episteme that is abject to the modern project appears as a prior stage that needs to be overcome in order to become human.’
Collective public demonstrations have been an emblematic part of feminist movements in connection with the struggle against violence toward women in the Global South. One initiative I am part of is the collective Hysterix (Lima, 2012) formed by women artists, all with different backgrounds in Peru. Our collective focuses on interventions in public spaces with visceral performances and live paintings or murals.
Hysterix is an initial exploration, involving the collective body taking over spaces, and practically reconfiguring artistic and organizational methods. Hysterix was born from the need to occupy areas that have been denied us, as women and artists critical of the borders of the city’s hegemonic artistic sphere, at the same time facing the possibility of being subjected to violence for being out in public. By bringing large female characters to life, our work reclaims the public spaces, the streets, and the night, for women and non-normative bodies.
The methodology we have developed over the years is to treat the intervention as a ritual where our collective presence, our collective body is part of the work, a constant work in progress. We barely work with drafts or have preconceived ideas about how we want the murals to look. Our intervention in the spaces spontaneously ended up with music playing on speakers, laughter, arguments, and loud conversations going from one platform of the scaffold to the other.
High rates of feminicide are usually justified in Peru’s mass media by scrutinizing the victim’s life. If the crime occurred on the street, in a place outside her home, then the social verdict, and the law, perform double victimization. The street, then, becomes a place where a woman forfeits the state of the perfect victim. In this way, our collective presence in the streets was disruptive in itself.
Argentine-Brazilian academic and feminist Rita Segato points out that feminicides are almost mechanical practices for the extermination of women, and they are also an invention of modernity; feminicide is the barbarism of colonial modernity (Segato, 2016:119)7. The machismo rooted in daily ways of relating is untouchable, because it requires us to question the paradigms of gender, race, and class that sustain us, or so we believe. How can we break paradigms rooted so deeply, amid such complex feelings?
[6] Espinosa-Miñoso, Yuderkys, “Una crítica descolonial a la epistemología feminista crítica,” El Cotidiano, núm. 184, marzo-abril, 2014, pp 7-12. Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Unidad Azcapotzalco Distrito
[7] Segato, Rita Lauta “La guerra contra las mujeres”, 2016: Traficantes de Sueños.
In 2018, Hysterix was part of a feminist camp in the town of Visviri in Chile, right next to the border with Bolivia and Peru. We cohabited there with women born in those territories, but more precisely we gathered to question the existence of and find the limits of the nation-states. We were three artists born in Lima (Peru) with different roots, mainly Andean and afro: Angélica Chávez Cáceres, Cecilia Rejtman and me, and activists/artists born living and working in La Paz and Santa Cruz: Sara Sanjinez, Nadia Callau and Alejandra Menacho, who were questioning the internal socio-cultural (racial) borders within Bolivia. We were two people born in Chile: Daniela Aravena and Katia Sepulveda, and a Mapuche artist-activist, Margarita Calfio. We were everything and we were nowhere.
We were there not knowing.
The potential of not knowing
One day, Angélica, Sara, Margarita, and I were left to wait for a car to pick us up from the borderland where nature and hail were our sole company for an hour.
We started to feel frozen and we worried about the time passing. We felt the danger of the unknown and the effects on our bodies, which were getting weaker in the harsh weather.
Sara downloaded her upbeat Spotify playlist, then we felt hope.
We started dancing, cheering, and laughing. We put our bodies close to each other and followed the music to keep warm. To keep up.
Sara, Margarita, Angélica, and I investigate gender-based violence and experience it in our own bodies in different instances. More specifically, one of the interventions depicted the drawings of women who were victims of human trafficking mainly from Bolivia via the train route that goes through Chile.
Borders concentrate political and material resources mobilized in their ‘defense’, for the physical exclusion of people and for their signifying role in the enactment of legal and social processes aimed at identifying people as illegal.
List of artworks on this page (from above)
- First media: ‘Indomita fest’ an animation made to promote one of the parties we organized in Lima as a collective.
- Second media: PDF - Serie Madammes. Murals made between 2012 - 2019.
- Third video: Perreo en la nieve’ (Twerking in the snow) Visviri, 2018 by Hysterix Collective.