Vision and presence 2024: performance cycle

Marta Pinilla presents Baroque Sacred Cosmology in a version updated renewed and adapted to the museum. This performance aims to reflect on what the art world would be like in a parallel universe and its relationship with the Baroque. On this occasion various performers wearing costumes designed by Pinilla invite the audience to undertake a tour of the galleries, stopping in front of works whose subjects have determined this Spanish artist’s life, including religion, solitude and joy.

In El cuerpo fugaz Dominican artists Lizette Nin and María Monegro focus on themes such as the migrant black body, the human cost of migration and female self-care. Taking the history of the wreck of a ship carrying Dominican migrants to Puerto Rico, the performance establishes a parallel with African emigration to Europe. At the same time, through a choreography in which the two artists’ plaits intertwine in an embrace, their action alludes to the connection of traditions between continents.  

With this performance Las Domínguez de Ramos, a collective comprising Viviana Ramos Di Tommaso and María Laura Domínguez, aim to give visibility and pay tribute to the victims of femicide in their country of origin, Argentina, in 2023. The two artists offer a collective reading of all these murders while with the assistance of the participating audience the names of each of these women are unstitched from their skirts. By doing so and from the standpoint of responsibility and social commitment, they aim to involve us in this dramatic reality in order to eradicate violence of this kind.

New York-based cross-cultural artist Yohanna M. Roa focuses on Pocahontas and Malinche, two characters with similar lives who played a defining role in the conquest processes. Their race, gender, and social class have been constantly overwritten in historical discourse in order to use them to sustain structures of power and control. In her performance, Roa embodies the social problems that have constituted categories of oppression due to the labels imposed on these two historical figures for being women of indigenous race and belonging to the nobility.

The second lecture in the performances cycle “Vision and presence”, in this case given by the Argentinian writer Kekena Corvalán, a feminist curator and professor of Latin American art. She will be presenting the “Red Artchivas” [Women’s art/archive network] research and fieldwork project which, for the last fifteen years, has aimed to amplify the pathway of women and protest through collective, territorialised and self-aware artistic practices. 

The study focuses on two groups which produce their work from the starting point of friendship between women artists: the “Pipi Shermans” (Claudia García Lorente and Julieta Basso), residents of Mar del Plata, and the “Caudillas del Barro” (Susana Zapata, Tina Núñez Caminos and Luciana Pirro), residents of Victoria, Entre Ríos. 

From an Absurdist standpoint, the first engages in delirious formal exploration and in the lack of meaning which emerges from the unexpected, reinstating uncertainty in the ludic gesture of the domestic realm, before the vast sea where the Atlantic reaches the coast of Argentina. The second looks at how wetlands and water hyacinths are being damaged, with the artists applying mud to themselves and reinstating the ancient arts of the fire and performance in the context of environmental, patriarcal and castigatory abuse, both within and outside the art world. 

In both cases, embodied activism becomes living art and individual creation disappears as the loving gesture between the artists empowers all.

In this performance Estíbaliz Sádaba revives a series of women artists forgotten by the hegemonic discourse, which is nourished by a linear vision of art history based on chronological and hetero-patricarchal criteria. With each participative piece the Bilbao-born Sádaba invites the public to write the names of these artists and to stick them on a blank canvas.

The Bolivian artist Alejandra Dorado pays tribute to the street sellers of her native country who, in a context characterised by poverty, unemployment and low quality of life, support the family economically while also doing housework, which brings no financial benefit but occupies part of their time.

Women in Africa are the bedrock of the family, responsible for the household tasks and the education of their children. Nonetheless, they are prohibited from taking part in crucial decisions over the future of the village, participating in rituals and playing certain instruments such as drums. In this performance the Guinean artist Dolores Nchama gives voice to and champion all these silenced women through a sonorous performance.

What happens when our gaze changes its epistemological perspective and the canonical works of art history are subjected to a decolonial critique? What ancestral, heteropatriarchal violences are revealed in the representations of masterpieces that have reified the female body? 

The emblematic work A Negra (1923) by Tarsila do Amaral, the leading female artist of Brazilian Modernism, serves as a guide and starting point for the art historian Suset Sánchez (born Havana, 1977) to undertake a disruptive exercise on “ways of seeing.” Her lecture will address the historicity and ideology of the interpretations of this well known image, in which a Black female body reveals political power and ethno-racial tensions as a founding image of Brazilian modern art and nation stories based on the discourse of racial democracy in the 20th century. 

Starting with A Negra, Sánchez traces a route towards other images in which contemporary feminist artistic practices resignify women’s rebellious anatomy. The images that accompany her on this exercise traverse the resisting anatomy of non-normative bodies, proud of their differences, which survive racism, xenophobia, pathologisations, media beauty canons, stereotypes, displacements and numerous structural violences established in the control systems of global biopolitics.

Aniova Prandy seeks to make visible and create accounts that update our experience and relationship with the past, focusing on memory and the need to honour the dead. Through a tour of the museum this Dominican artist pays tribute to all the African and Taino women who were enslaved on their arrival in Santo Domingo in the 16th century.

Verónica Vides focuses on the ecosystem of forests as the symbol of a perfect system and one fundamental for life, which human beings have nonetheless been destroying for centuries from a patriarchal position based on economic gain. In this performance the Salvadoran artist, wearing a cloak made of fallen branches, undertakes a tour around different works in the collection which depict forests, placing a crown of lilies below each one.