Vision and presence 2023: performance cycle

Wearing a dress that recalls a flamenco costume but inspired by the colourful wax fabrics of her childhood, the Afro-Spanish artist Agnes Essonti undertakes an exercise of collective memory in various galleries of the collection, focusing on slavery, identity, race and the sense of belonging.

Basing herself on traditions from her native Cuba, in Being reborn Alejandra Glez combines influences from the Yoruba religion (originally from Africa) with those of the Cuban Taínos in the Antilles to create an action which refers to the oceans, the sea and water as creator of life and which connects the women who accompany her in a new birth filled with sisterhood and the healing of lived trauma.

With the collaboration of the Tara Foundation for Women.

In a collaborative action with her daughter Kira, the Mexican artist Lorena Wolffer compiles the experiences and opinions of young feminists regarding their desires and sexuality and their viewpoint on the world and way of approaching the present in the light of patriarchal challenges.

This performance is part of the “Ellas Crean” festival and is also supported by the Cultural Institute of Mexico in Spain. 

Based on general experience and on her own story, Osiris Ferrera visibilises and denounces violence against women in Honduras, a country that barely monitors cases of feminicide. Through continually writing information referring to the deaths or murders of women between 2012 and 2023, this Honduran artist transmutes her own experience into a healing action.

This performance establishes a relationship between the collection and quotations from leading authors of all periods and from a wide range of geographical origins and contexts that reveal the gender roles assigned to women over history, their inferior status and the guilt they experience for being women. Using this dialogue, Spanish artist KarmeLaHoz generates a survey of these paintings in order to symbolically bury the patriarchal system.

In Fluidity the Honduran artist Scarlett Rovelaz reflects on the present-day disconnection with the environment and on the drying up of Spain’s rivers. Starting from the painting Orchid and Humming Bird near a Waterfall by Martin Johnson Heade in the Carmen Thyssen Collection, the artist traces the course of a metaphorical river that reminds us of the need to rethink human beings’ relationship with nature.

This performance is also a homage to the Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres and to all those women who have been murdered for defending the land.

Amapola Prada (born Lima, 1978) presents an action based on the relationships between the body, psychology and history, and on the idea that the reactivation of emotionally conflictive historical facts, transmitted from generation to generation, has the potential to process those facts in a symbolic space.

In this performance, the artists of Art al Quadrat (Mónica and Gema del Rey Jordà, born Valencia, 1982) take some of the pejorative terms found in trial reports from the Civil War to describe accused women, such as “dangerous, incendiary or immoral”, and wear them attached to their own bodies in a metaphorical and physical sense. By doing so, they transmute them into something collective in an exercise of empathy and sisterhood with the audience.

This performance is part of the Cultural Agenda of the Instituto de las Mujeres.

Artist Ana Beltrán (born Alcora, 1986) focuses on how the press reports on violence against women and how it minimises the impact of statistics. This performance shows that the victims are women with names and a life, and Beltrán recounts the data using a more immediate and intimate language than is habitually employed.

Through her own identity-body Paula B. Pailamilla generates a trans-territorial connection in the place where she undertakes her performance. She thus raises issues such as “what does my body mean in this territory?” In My body is a museum the Chilean artist looks at the colonial history inherent to western museums in relation to indigenous bodies, the Spanish Crown’s colonial past and the invasion of South America.