On a path that begins to outline a more diverse presence in Central American art, curator Maya Juracán talks with a few of the region's collectives about the possibility of visualizing futures where creative processes endowed with life expand and contract; healing and weaving genealogies to write another history of art.
"There is nothing new
under the sun
but there are new suns."
Octavia Butler.
Thinking about futures may seem like a very distant situation when the present is a constant struggle with existence at every moment. And that is how we exist in the art world in this Central America. In Guatemala, it wasn’t until 2018 that the Municipal Cultural Center had the first exhibition of Central American women, an art show also curated only by women. In previous instances, in Costa Rica in the middle of 2017 a museum curator claimed that there were no women artists producing at that time. It is important to reflect on this, since throughout the isthmus there are many women curators, in contrast to the positions of power in foreign and local museums belonging mainly to male curators. In this context and within this region, forming feminist, transfeminist, or anti-patriarchal collectives of women curators and artists represents going against all odds. It is about forging futures in which we exist. However, this statement also entails not trying to fit under the previously established linear narratives, that is, collectivizing ourselves to overthrow those patriarchal rules that propose a single way of telling the history of art. It is daring to tell our stories to ourselves in our own words and through our own feelings. In this interview I have brought together four Central American and diasporic collectives who narrate the possibility of the encounter as a peripheral practice that deprograms memory.Due to the scarce surviving printed material in the region, our voices are memories resistant to fire, flood, limited space, and even pest invasion.Thus, our interviews quickly became a feminist research method and creative practice helping us to explore micro-histories of engaged artistic production that contribute to questioning patriarchal structures. These feminist oral histories aim to recover conversations as another way of building infrastructure and creating art history, reclaiming oral memory as a politically and ethically grounded relational practice. Something very important within community-based feminism is healing. How is your collective, in addition to being an artistic project, a safe space of complicity? La Revuelta: This collective arose from the stagnation generated by the pandemic, when each one of us was going through different processes and situations. We were locked down after taking to the streets, fighting our fears, raising our voices and taking up space. Just as our experiences are collective, they are also individual, and that implies that the healing is also individual. This is a safe space because we decided every day to believe in it and to build it out of affectionate care and radical tenderness. It was important for us to understand that healing is part of building: to organize our anger in order to know how to make decisions. A safe space is also a place where we can name our discomfort without feeling vulnerable. Intergalactix: Affectionate relationships, our personal experiences, are an important form of knowledge for mutual collaboration. In that context where affect, critical thinking, and theory are organically linked,
Intergalactix becomes a community space where many of us share our stories, narratives, and ideas to sustain a network in the pursuit of honoring the collective life struggle.The testimonies of migrants in The Fire Theory integrate and amplify their artistic works, resonating in a safe place, a place of listening in which many identified themselves. Tanya Aguiñiga, together with students from the Jardín de Mariposas shelter in Tijuana, created small spiritual spaces, ceramic copalero incense burners that look like altars, small windows of memory where one can have a moment of healing, of mourning, of ritual.
Do we want to redefine or create a new word for curatorial practices?
A transfeminist curatorship seeks to ally itself with other resistances, seeks to weave solid relationships, and recognizes that there are also multiple and infinite forms.Spiral thinking implies turning to relate from different points: opening horizons, expansion and contraction. With Intergalactix and Kaqjay Moloj, Beatriz Cortez, and Fiebre Ediciones, we have learned that time is long, continuous; it is the futures circulating within the past and the present. Futures are heard from the past and reflected in our present, then back to the past.PFAC: As a collective and community, we are constantly imagining a future of decolonization and feminism. This imaginary is reflected in our initiatives to build alongside emerging artists of feminized or non-binary identities, in order to produce diverse knowledge, create an archive of complicit artists, and articulate an authentic feminist curatorial gaze embracing our conversations and struggles. Casa MA: How can we imagine the future when the past has not yet been examined? How are we going to live that future when violence is chronic in the present? How to wake up tomorrow with all these books that have not yet been written? How to transform museums that have not even been created? How to convince them that we exist? Gala Berger of Casa Ma turns the last question into more questioning that traces possibilities. This conversation, more than an interaction, sought, paraphrasing Donna Haraway, an infringement to affect and be affected by the words of others. In this spectrum of questioning, I ask: Are we aware that our privilege brought us to this space? How are we incorporating political battles about the body, the land, and capitalism into our practices? How is our theory a politically active social tool? Are we naming these realities comfortably for the art world? In this conversation many collectives raise questions as a means of encounter. This is one more way of breaking exercises of power, even if our closeness to hegemonic cultural capital is undeniable.
On a path that begins to outline a more diverse presence in Central American art, curator Maya Juracán talks with a few of the region's collectives about the possibility of visualizing futures where creative processes endowed with life expand and contract; healing and weaving genealogies to write another history of art.
"There is nothing new
under the sun
but there are new suns."
Octavia Butler.
Thinking about futures may seem like a very distant situation when the present is a constant struggle with existence at every moment. And that is how we exist in the art world in this Central America. In Guatemala, it wasn’t until 2018 that the Municipal Cultural Center had the first exhibition of Central American women, an art show also curated only by women. In previous instances, in Costa Rica in the middle of 2017 a museum curator claimed that there were no women artists producing at that time. It is important to reflect on this, since throughout the isthmus there are many women curators, in contrast to the positions of power in foreign and local museums belonging mainly to male curators. In this context and within this region, forming feminist, transfeminist, or anti-patriarchal collectives of women curators and artists represents going against all odds. It is about forging futures in which we exist. However, this statement also entails not trying to fit under the previously established linear narratives, that is, collectivizing ourselves to overthrow those patriarchal rules that propose a single way of telling the history of art. It is daring to tell our stories to ourselves in our own words and through our own feelings. In this interview I have brought together four Central American and diasporic collectives who narrate the possibility of the encounter as a peripheral practice that deprograms memory.Due to the scarce surviving printed material in the region, our voices are memories resistant to fire, flood, limited space, and even pest invasion.Thus, our interviews quickly became a feminist research method and creative practice helping us to explore micro-histories of engaged artistic production that contribute to questioning patriarchal structures. These feminist oral histories aim to recover conversations as another way of building infrastructure and creating art history, reclaiming oral memory as a politically and ethically grounded relational practice. Something very important within community-based feminism is healing. How is your collective, in addition to being an artistic project, a safe space of complicity? La Revuelta: This collective arose from the stagnation generated by the pandemic, when each one of us was going through different processes and situations. We were locked down after taking to the streets, fighting our fears, raising our voices and taking up space. Just as our experiences are collective, they are also individual, and that implies that the healing is also individual. This is a safe space because we decided every day to believe in it and to build it out of affectionate care and radical tenderness. It was important for us to understand that healing is part of building: to organize our anger in order to know how to make decisions. A safe space is also a place where we can name our discomfort without feeling vulnerable. Intergalactix: Affectionate relationships, our personal experiences, are an important form of knowledge for mutual collaboration. In that context where affect, critical thinking, and theory are organically linked,
Intergalactix becomes a community space where many of us share our stories, narratives, and ideas to sustain a network in the pursuit of honoring the collective life struggle.The testimonies of migrants in The Fire Theory integrate and amplify their artistic works, resonating in a safe place, a place of listening in which many identified themselves. Tanya Aguiñiga, together with students from the Jardín de Mariposas shelter in Tijuana, created small spiritual spaces, ceramic copalero incense burners that look like altars, small windows of memory where one can have a moment of healing, of mourning, of ritual.
Do we want to redefine or create a new word for curatorial practices?
A transfeminist curatorship seeks to ally itself with other resistances, seeks to weave solid relationships, and recognizes that there are also multiple and infinite forms.Spiral thinking implies turning to relate from different points: opening horizons, expansion and contraction. With Intergalactix and Kaqjay Moloj, Beatriz Cortez, and Fiebre Ediciones, we have learned that time is long, continuous; it is the futures circulating within the past and the present. Futures are heard from the past and reflected in our present, then back to the past.PFAC: As a collective and community, we are constantly imagining a future of decolonization and feminism. This imaginary is reflected in our initiatives to build alongside emerging artists of feminized or non-binary identities, in order to produce diverse knowledge, create an archive of complicit artists, and articulate an authentic feminist curatorial gaze embracing our conversations and struggles. Casa MA: How can we imagine the future when the past has not yet been examined? How are we going to live that future when violence is chronic in the present? How to wake up tomorrow with all these books that have not yet been written? How to transform museums that have not even been created? How to convince them that we exist? Gala Berger of Casa Ma turns the last question into more questioning that traces possibilities. This conversation, more than an interaction, sought, paraphrasing Donna Haraway, an infringement to affect and be affected by the words of others. In this spectrum of questioning, I ask: Are we aware that our privilege brought us to this space? How are we incorporating political battles about the body, the land, and capitalism into our practices? How is our theory a politically active social tool? Are we naming these realities comfortably for the art world? In this conversation many collectives raise questions as a means of encounter. This is one more way of breaking exercises of power, even if our closeness to hegemonic cultural capital is undeniable.
Pie de foto para Imagen 2
Pie de foto para Imagen 2
Subscribe to our newsletter!
¡Gracias por suscribirte!
CALLE ARTÍCULO 123 #6, INT100, COLONIA CENTRO, DELEGACIÓN CUAUHTÉMOC, CDMX 06048, MÉXICO 2024 // TERREMOTO