ARTBO
Bogotá, Colombia - Sep. 26/29, 2024
Our vital home. Kanaroagontsi
Earth is a vital space, community and collectivity, which makes transverse and inter-sector echo-feminism a key aspect in the struggle to defend the body-territory. It should be done from visibility spaces told by its protagonists and not from the stories of the dominant groups.
When we come back to the body and its relevance it seems to be increasingly evident that this is an unfinished search. Our body, that is, our first territory, our house and its extension to our environment become protagonists and are witnesses of historically marginalized stories, of the recovery of memory and criticism of the present to create an imaginary of common future.
In this proposal words and images become the very object of work. A divergent language with multidirectional reading, under an aesthetic approach that raises universal questions, skin questions that emphasize better possibilities for our life in the community.
Within the Peruvian territory, Natalia Revilla, explores epistemicide and ambiguities, uncertainties and gaps in communication by studying the indigenous peoples of Peru. Natalia is concerned about Western paradigms where interaction with nature is mediated by social and political relations, power and hierarchies. In the Murui-Buue, Matsigenka, Ese Eja y Awajún communities the leadership of women committed to the promotion of education is strengthened, also the empowerment of women, the protection of victims of sexual abuse and the pride of their identity.
Awajun Nuwa Waimaku words are translated as a visionary woman in English, but in reality it is something with a vital meaning. It means "those who have found the way" and have the strength to achieve what they wanted. The story of each Nuwa Waimaku tells their fight against the dispossession of his territory and the care of their family in the Amazon.
Natalia has found the way. She, the hereditary, the ancestral, knows languages, potions, the healing power of plants and seeds. This is what her sisters and aunts have taught her and she knows the importance of preserving them. There are 48 native languages of Peru to the edge of extinction and she tells us about their power. The power of the word.
Francisca Rojas weaves a complex living tapestry of ceramics, quipus, “guitarreras”, tassels and characters that give voice to various forces in balance in life, poetry, art and native cultures. Physical or imaginary quipus knotted by women's hands with a decolonized posture in art and life.
By using black ceramics, she alludes to the production of typical ceramics from the central-southern area of Chile, particularly Quinchamalí, whose material base proposes a questioning of the distinctions between art and crafts. A powerful female army of potter artists who intertwine local crafts, colonial religious iconography, and contemporary popular imagination.
The manual element as a connecting aspect in her works is still present in her Ancestral Aliens. Here the female representation becomes evident again, as well as the importance of textiles as a protesting and almost subversive element.
This declaration of intentions shows a space of cultural resistance through the love of life and the fabrics of civilization, its origins, its duality, its diversity and the importance of accepting to be part of it. A firm and poetic approach of the word as political positioning and of meeting spaces and respect for otherness, a place where we can hug each other tight.
Gabriela Rosso