I am currently working on the makings of communities in more-than-human worlds, through forms of knowledge that influence, are marked by, and exceed modernity. I approach art as a collective process for communal encounters, that takes shape through ritual and relational practices, projects in public space, through video, writing, and drawing.
b. Lima > Vienna. Artist, researcher, writer. MA. in Cultural Studies and Fine Arts, BA in Sociology and Communication Sciences in Lima. Insta: @imaynacaceres Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Ruth Sondereger.
A personal (re)collection of the artistic-spiritual project Back/s Together. Gloria Anzaldúa, her... more A personal (re)collection of the artistic-spiritual project Back/s Together. Gloria Anzaldúa, her drawings, her voice, our connection to her (2018). This exhibition project carried the aim to familiarize a larger audience with the work of Gloria Anzaldúa as well as to share the centrality of her drawings for her theoretical work. The project’s aim was to underline a sense of resonant community while, in parallel, highlighting the faculties of Anzaldúa not only as a writer and poet but as an artista chamana. We approached artistic practices as connected to spiritual activism, practices that contemplate multidimensional ways of understanding knowledge, that connect curating/curar to healing as an indigenous and transfeminist tradition, and that contribute, through a plurality of myths, to the reconfiguration of a new consciousness. We highlight artists (indigenous, black, queer, and trans) with links to Abya Yala that resonate with several of Anzaldúa’s known theoretical reflections, such as borderlands, auto-historia, making faces/ haciendo caras, Coyolxauhqui Imperative, Coatlicue State, as well as indigenous mythologies.
A dialogue on ritual practices and meaning between Imayna Caceres, Adriana Ciudad and Ana Zavala,... more A dialogue on ritual practices and meaning between Imayna Caceres, Adriana Ciudad and Ana Zavala, in Bisagra 005: Destinos y presagios compartidos, Lima, 2021-2022.
Reflexiones y aprendizajes que reunimos en nuestro colectivo Intervenciones Anticoloniales en Vie... more Reflexiones y aprendizajes que reunimos en nuestro colectivo Intervenciones Anticoloniales en Viena, junto a otros colectivos latinoamericanos, durante la organización del 12 de octubre en Viena.
Reflexionen und Erkenntnisse, die wir in unserem Kollektiv Anticolonial Interventionen in Wien zu... more Reflexionen und Erkenntnisse, die wir in unserem Kollektiv Anticolonial Interventionen in Wien zusammen mit anderen lateinamerikanischen Gruppen während der Organisation vom 12. Oktober in Wien gemacht haben.
"Kinship". Imayna Caceres uses black paper for her work on which she draws using various material... more "Kinship". Imayna Caceres uses black paper for her work on which she draws using various materials. People, landscapes, buildings, objects —all elements that reflect the artist's sensitive approach. Every single picture reflects the artist multiple approach. She applies a holistic understanding of the world to her art. All forms of life, the material world and the spiritual world find their way into her imagery. Based on this self-conception, a person, for example, can be "a bit vegetal a bit human, a bit stone", as can be read on one of her drawings. —Eds. Margarethe Makovec and Anton Lederer. Rotor, Center for Contemporary Art Graz.
A magazine as bidimentional artistic space. Co-curated by Imayna Caceres and Verena Melgarejo Wei... more A magazine as bidimentional artistic space. Co-curated by Imayna Caceres and Verena Melgarejo Weinandt. Rituals hold peoples together in their need for connecting and transcendence. Determined by the forces which establish which rituals are valid, the Catholic monopoly on rituality, almost completely displaced any other symbolic systems that proposed strategies of resistance for non-dominant groups and positions, as the Mexican performance artist Katia Tirado reminds us. Within this history, the ritual has been and continues to be a space of production and affirmation of marginalized and dissident subjectivities and world views, and of empowering critical positions. This power is nevertheless fragile, for the ritual can lose meaning if turned into a superficial treatment of foreign codes.
In this issue, the invited artists share a deep preoccupation with the intersection of political, sexual, ecological and spiritual realms. Their works push the association between Third-World, racialized, gendered bodies and colonial history, political activism and ancestral references, sexual politics and mystical sources. With a performative approach centered on the body, the artistic acts are acts of communion, as much as acts of rupture. Here, the ritual is the moment of fusion of the separate spheres in which we exist; where subterranean pains and memories come to the surface, questioning the dominant sense of reality, and becoming turmoil before making sense as a whole.
In curating this issue we have approached the artistic and theoretical reflections of two iconic figures: the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, and the Chicana author and artist Gloria Anzaldúa. For Anzaldúa, her job as an artist “is to bear witness to what haunts us, to step back and attempt to see the pattern in these events (personal and societal) and how we can repair el daño (the damage) by using the imagination and its vision.” In tune, for Mendieta, art’s greatest value is its spiritual role: “My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.”
As artists and curators, our praxis contemplates multidimensional ways of understanding knowledge that connects art to healing, and that contributes to the reconfiguration of a new consciousness.
Raíz. Tejedora del subsuelo, creando mundos de sustento, abriendo camino para que la vida ocurra.... more Raíz. Tejedora del subsuelo, creando mundos de sustento, abriendo camino para que la vida ocurra. Anclaje y almacenamiento, soporte y resistencia. Rompiendo concreto y asfalto, sosteniendo la tierra. No todas las raíces son iguales. Raíces que nos conectan a un suelo y que nos atan, como cordones al vientre del territorio. El mundo de los ancestros que son nuestras raíces, más allá de nuestra especie. Nuestra conexión con todo lo que existe en el universo. Los caminos que nos llevan a nosotros, las raíces que nos mantienen en pie. Arraigando, estableciendo el lugar propio, haciendo una vida enriquecedora a través de la sequía y la abundancia. Expandiendo el conocimiento de los mundos en los que vivimos. Echar raíz para prosperar, para no desconectarse. Echando raíz a través de una conexión con las tierras y aguas y con las plantas curativas locales nos ayuda. Raíces que se asemejan a ríos, venas y truenos; como un lenguaje en el que la vida habla.
Aire. El aire se mueve y lleva vida, transportando conocimiento y otros mundos. Aire que baila, dibuja, esculpe y diseña. Los vientos nos recuerdan que todo está en constante movimiento. Que las cosas que construimos pueden convertirse fácilmente en temporales, y que cada reordenación de lo que nos rodea es una lección sobre no tomar las cosas por sentadas. Y si nuestras cosas se mueven tan fácilmente es porque al final, no son realmente nuestras. Que la las fronteras son porosas. Si los vientos pueden enseñar esto, es porque en primer lugar, desde tiempos inmemoriales, ellos han sido los primeros en saberlo.
(p.185-194) Anti*Colonial Fantasies/Decolonial Strategies engaged in a critique of the consequences of colonialism, as well as in the imagination and possibility of alternative realities.
"I relate the term ‘curation’ to the word 'curación', which is Spanish for 'healing', as in a process of transformation that passes through the body and implies the development of a new consciousness. (..) In this frame, I see the role of the curator as moderating and intervening in a community of senses, undoing, questioning and getting involved in a wider political work for re-imagining society. (..) from rage and indignation, to vulnerability and self-care. We need a common sensibility that allows us to understand and make space for all these responses and expressions."
In the Peruvian Amazon a series of protests against the extraction of oil, wood and gold in prote... more In the Peruvian Amazon a series of protests against the extraction of oil, wood and gold in protected areas is violently countered by the State and ends with a hundred wounded civilians and the death of what is described as "murdered policemen" and "deceased natives". Although the figure "exploitation of natural resources-damage to the environment-protest-state repression" is a constant in Peru, the protest of the Amazonian peoples unveils the most violent aspects of the prevailing system. The state refers to protestors as terrorists who impede the country's progress, or even using racist depictions of the communities, as good natives that are being manipulated for political ends. This denial of the indigenous subject as a political subject is questioned by the protest speech of an Awajun-Wampi woman who was directly affected by the conflict, and who provides an analysis of the role of the colonial State.
Periskop #24 Forum for kunsthistorisk debat, Dec 28, 2020, 2020
Researching through drawing about practices of political relationality to other ways of being in ... more Researching through drawing about practices of political relationality to other ways of being in the world. In this case, mestizo-Indigenous practices that stem from Amazonian Andean worlds and that have for long engaged with knowledge that is produced by other-than-humans. The findings presented were experienced as lessons gathered in the interaction with other-than-human beings, situations, and events. Can academic discussion aspire to validity when discussions about reality only happen between humans, in the absence of other non-human agents of history that build reality along with us?
What might happen to co-existing communities that are more-than-human, if corporate extractivism ... more What might happen to co-existing communities that are more-than-human, if corporate extractivism continues to be allowed to wreck life, affecting a large multiplicity of ecosystems and modes of living? For Amanda Piña, who has been observing these effects on the Apu Wamani mountain-being located near Santiago de Chile, close to where she grew up and where part of her family still lives, this is a distinctly troubling question. Through highland ritual dances, her aim is to channel the power of coming together towards active modes of co-survivance.
Breathing with her entrails glittering on the tongue that greets us, Piña as incarnated mountain-being conjures dances as a catalog of movements-with-the-other which are part of the complex being which is (with) the Apu mountain.
Traditional ritual dances, unlike what their name seems to suggest, don’t remain static. Rather, each body that dances it transforms the dance, and so the dance continues to grow like a living being. These dances constitute a body-based knowledge that understands ‘humans’ as having been artificially separated from ‘nature’, and recognizes symbiotic relations to other earth-beings, maintaining an invested relationality with the whole of the cosmos. As practices of reciprocity that retain an awareness of our radical interdependence, and where the artistic is spiritual, social, functional and worldly, intertwined with all spheres of life. Facing the current multiple socioecological crises, we urgently need artistic practices that invite us (as Climatic Dances does) to take another look at how, in certain modes of existing, thinking, and moving with others, alternative ways of creating knowledge might surface.
Anti*Colonial Fantasies / Decolonial Strategies brings together artists from different diasporas, students and lecturers, who engage with a critique of the repercussions of colonialism—including in academia—and the quest for transforming this reality.
Working with various media—performances, videos, installations, paintings, photographs, drawings, and writing—as well as participatory formats, the artists expose ways in which colonialism persists today. Raising questions of race, sexuality, gender, spirituality, space, and time, they occupy themselves with the imagination and possibility of alternative realities and pursue decolonial strategies of resistance and knowledge production.
With contributions by: Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Gerardo Montes de Oca, Imayna Caceres, Sunanda Mesquita, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Amoako Boafo, Stephanie Misa, Sandra Monterroso, Tatiana Nascimento, Ezgi Erol, Firas Shehadeh, Hansel Sato, Sophie Utikal, Rini Mitra, Mariel Rodríguez, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Cana Bilir-Meier, Pêdra Costa, and Eduardo Triviño Cely.
Anti*Colonial Fantasies is a student and lecturer initiative that is part of a history of decolonial, postcolonial, antiracist initiatives at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and within Austria. It belongs to a genealogy of artistic works produced by BPoC (Black and People of Color) and migrant artists that seek to transform the contexts and spaces they occupy. These interventions seek to address colonialism and racism from within the centers of hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge. The activist protagonists of this history of BPoC political actions are from different diasporas and move within the realm of arts where they affirm BPoC identity.
In this work, I relate to the path of conocimiento, a concept developed by Gloria Anzaldúa, which... more In this work, I relate to the path of conocimiento, a concept developed by Gloria Anzaldúa, which is a form of spiritual inquiry/activism, reached via creative acts—writing, art-making, dancing, healing, teaching, meditation, and spiritual activism. In writing and drawing, I weave lines to different realities: the rural upbringings of the women who raised me, my migration from the Third World, the meaning of home and belonging, and my connection to all that exists on the planet as political consciousness.
Anti*Colonial Fantasies - Decolonial Strategies Editors: Imayna Caceres, Sunanda Mesquita, Sophie... more Anti*Colonial Fantasies - Decolonial Strategies Editors: Imayna Caceres, Sunanda Mesquita, Sophie Utikal Anti*Colonial Fantasies / Decolonial Strategies brings together artists from different diasporas, students and lecturers, who engage with a critique of the repercussions of colonialism—including in academia—and the quest for transforming this reality. Working with various media—performances, videos, installations, paintings, photographs, drawings, and writing—as well as participatory formats, the artists expose ways in which colonialism persists today. Raising questions of race, sexuality, gender, spirituality, space, and time, they occupy themselves with the imagination and possibility of alternative realities and pursue decolonial strategies of resistance and knowledge production. With contributions by: Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Gerardo Montes de Oca, Imayna Caceres, Sunanda Mesquita, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Amoako Boafo, Stephanie Misa, Sandra Monterroso, Tatiana Nascimento, Ezgi Erol, Firas Shehadeh, Hansel Sato, Sophie Utikal, Rini Mitra, Mariel Rodríguez, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Cana Bilir-Meier, Pêdra Costa, and Eduardo Triviño Cely. Anti*Colonial Fantasies is a student and lecturer initiative that is part of a history of decolonial, postcolonial, antiracist initiatives at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and within Austria. It belongs to a genealogy of artistic works produced by BPoC (Black and People of Color) and migrant artists that seek to transform the contexts and spaces they occupy. These interventions seek to address colonialism and racism from within the centers of hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge. The activist protagonists of this history of BPoC political actions are from different diasporas and move within the realm of arts where they affirm BPoC identity.
Periskop – Forum for kunsthistorisk debat, Dec 28, 2020
Researching through drawing about practices of political relationality to other ways of being in ... more Researching through drawing about practices of political relationality to other ways of being in the world. In this case, mestizo-Indigenous practices that stem from Amazonian Andean worlds and that have for long engaged with knowledge that is produced by other-than-humans. The findings presented were experienced as lessons gathered in the interaction with other-than-human beings, situations, and events. Can academic discussion aspire to validity when discussions about reality only happen between humans, in the absence of other non-human agents of history that build reality along with us?
A personal (re)collection of the artistic-spiritual project Back/s Together. Gloria Anzaldúa, her... more A personal (re)collection of the artistic-spiritual project Back/s Together. Gloria Anzaldúa, her drawings, her voice, our connection to her (2018). This exhibition project carried the aim to familiarize a larger audience with the work of Gloria Anzaldúa as well as to share the centrality of her drawings for her theoretical work. The project’s aim was to underline a sense of resonant community while, in parallel, highlighting the faculties of Anzaldúa not only as a writer and poet but as an artista chamana. We approached artistic practices as connected to spiritual activism, practices that contemplate multidimensional ways of understanding knowledge, that connect curating/curar to healing as an indigenous and transfeminist tradition, and that contribute, through a plurality of myths, to the reconfiguration of a new consciousness. We highlight artists (indigenous, black, queer, and trans) with links to Abya Yala that resonate with several of Anzaldúa’s known theoretical reflections, such as borderlands, auto-historia, making faces/ haciendo caras, Coyolxauhqui Imperative, Coatlicue State, as well as indigenous mythologies.
A dialogue on ritual practices and meaning between Imayna Caceres, Adriana Ciudad and Ana Zavala,... more A dialogue on ritual practices and meaning between Imayna Caceres, Adriana Ciudad and Ana Zavala, in Bisagra 005: Destinos y presagios compartidos, Lima, 2021-2022.
Reflexiones y aprendizajes que reunimos en nuestro colectivo Intervenciones Anticoloniales en Vie... more Reflexiones y aprendizajes que reunimos en nuestro colectivo Intervenciones Anticoloniales en Viena, junto a otros colectivos latinoamericanos, durante la organización del 12 de octubre en Viena.
Reflexionen und Erkenntnisse, die wir in unserem Kollektiv Anticolonial Interventionen in Wien zu... more Reflexionen und Erkenntnisse, die wir in unserem Kollektiv Anticolonial Interventionen in Wien zusammen mit anderen lateinamerikanischen Gruppen während der Organisation vom 12. Oktober in Wien gemacht haben.
"Kinship". Imayna Caceres uses black paper for her work on which she draws using various material... more "Kinship". Imayna Caceres uses black paper for her work on which she draws using various materials. People, landscapes, buildings, objects —all elements that reflect the artist's sensitive approach. Every single picture reflects the artist multiple approach. She applies a holistic understanding of the world to her art. All forms of life, the material world and the spiritual world find their way into her imagery. Based on this self-conception, a person, for example, can be "a bit vegetal a bit human, a bit stone", as can be read on one of her drawings. —Eds. Margarethe Makovec and Anton Lederer. Rotor, Center for Contemporary Art Graz.
A magazine as bidimentional artistic space. Co-curated by Imayna Caceres and Verena Melgarejo Wei... more A magazine as bidimentional artistic space. Co-curated by Imayna Caceres and Verena Melgarejo Weinandt. Rituals hold peoples together in their need for connecting and transcendence. Determined by the forces which establish which rituals are valid, the Catholic monopoly on rituality, almost completely displaced any other symbolic systems that proposed strategies of resistance for non-dominant groups and positions, as the Mexican performance artist Katia Tirado reminds us. Within this history, the ritual has been and continues to be a space of production and affirmation of marginalized and dissident subjectivities and world views, and of empowering critical positions. This power is nevertheless fragile, for the ritual can lose meaning if turned into a superficial treatment of foreign codes.
In this issue, the invited artists share a deep preoccupation with the intersection of political, sexual, ecological and spiritual realms. Their works push the association between Third-World, racialized, gendered bodies and colonial history, political activism and ancestral references, sexual politics and mystical sources. With a performative approach centered on the body, the artistic acts are acts of communion, as much as acts of rupture. Here, the ritual is the moment of fusion of the separate spheres in which we exist; where subterranean pains and memories come to the surface, questioning the dominant sense of reality, and becoming turmoil before making sense as a whole.
In curating this issue we have approached the artistic and theoretical reflections of two iconic figures: the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, and the Chicana author and artist Gloria Anzaldúa. For Anzaldúa, her job as an artist “is to bear witness to what haunts us, to step back and attempt to see the pattern in these events (personal and societal) and how we can repair el daño (the damage) by using the imagination and its vision.” In tune, for Mendieta, art’s greatest value is its spiritual role: “My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.”
As artists and curators, our praxis contemplates multidimensional ways of understanding knowledge that connects art to healing, and that contributes to the reconfiguration of a new consciousness.
Raíz. Tejedora del subsuelo, creando mundos de sustento, abriendo camino para que la vida ocurra.... more Raíz. Tejedora del subsuelo, creando mundos de sustento, abriendo camino para que la vida ocurra. Anclaje y almacenamiento, soporte y resistencia. Rompiendo concreto y asfalto, sosteniendo la tierra. No todas las raíces son iguales. Raíces que nos conectan a un suelo y que nos atan, como cordones al vientre del territorio. El mundo de los ancestros que son nuestras raíces, más allá de nuestra especie. Nuestra conexión con todo lo que existe en el universo. Los caminos que nos llevan a nosotros, las raíces que nos mantienen en pie. Arraigando, estableciendo el lugar propio, haciendo una vida enriquecedora a través de la sequía y la abundancia. Expandiendo el conocimiento de los mundos en los que vivimos. Echar raíz para prosperar, para no desconectarse. Echando raíz a través de una conexión con las tierras y aguas y con las plantas curativas locales nos ayuda. Raíces que se asemejan a ríos, venas y truenos; como un lenguaje en el que la vida habla.
Aire. El aire se mueve y lleva vida, transportando conocimiento y otros mundos. Aire que baila, dibuja, esculpe y diseña. Los vientos nos recuerdan que todo está en constante movimiento. Que las cosas que construimos pueden convertirse fácilmente en temporales, y que cada reordenación de lo que nos rodea es una lección sobre no tomar las cosas por sentadas. Y si nuestras cosas se mueven tan fácilmente es porque al final, no son realmente nuestras. Que la las fronteras son porosas. Si los vientos pueden enseñar esto, es porque en primer lugar, desde tiempos inmemoriales, ellos han sido los primeros en saberlo.
(p.185-194) Anti*Colonial Fantasies/Decolonial Strategies engaged in a critique of the consequences of colonialism, as well as in the imagination and possibility of alternative realities.
"I relate the term ‘curation’ to the word 'curación', which is Spanish for 'healing', as in a process of transformation that passes through the body and implies the development of a new consciousness. (..) In this frame, I see the role of the curator as moderating and intervening in a community of senses, undoing, questioning and getting involved in a wider political work for re-imagining society. (..) from rage and indignation, to vulnerability and self-care. We need a common sensibility that allows us to understand and make space for all these responses and expressions."
In the Peruvian Amazon a series of protests against the extraction of oil, wood and gold in prote... more In the Peruvian Amazon a series of protests against the extraction of oil, wood and gold in protected areas is violently countered by the State and ends with a hundred wounded civilians and the death of what is described as "murdered policemen" and "deceased natives". Although the figure "exploitation of natural resources-damage to the environment-protest-state repression" is a constant in Peru, the protest of the Amazonian peoples unveils the most violent aspects of the prevailing system. The state refers to protestors as terrorists who impede the country's progress, or even using racist depictions of the communities, as good natives that are being manipulated for political ends. This denial of the indigenous subject as a political subject is questioned by the protest speech of an Awajun-Wampi woman who was directly affected by the conflict, and who provides an analysis of the role of the colonial State.
Periskop #24 Forum for kunsthistorisk debat, Dec 28, 2020, 2020
Researching through drawing about practices of political relationality to other ways of being in ... more Researching through drawing about practices of political relationality to other ways of being in the world. In this case, mestizo-Indigenous practices that stem from Amazonian Andean worlds and that have for long engaged with knowledge that is produced by other-than-humans. The findings presented were experienced as lessons gathered in the interaction with other-than-human beings, situations, and events. Can academic discussion aspire to validity when discussions about reality only happen between humans, in the absence of other non-human agents of history that build reality along with us?
What might happen to co-existing communities that are more-than-human, if corporate extractivism ... more What might happen to co-existing communities that are more-than-human, if corporate extractivism continues to be allowed to wreck life, affecting a large multiplicity of ecosystems and modes of living? For Amanda Piña, who has been observing these effects on the Apu Wamani mountain-being located near Santiago de Chile, close to where she grew up and where part of her family still lives, this is a distinctly troubling question. Through highland ritual dances, her aim is to channel the power of coming together towards active modes of co-survivance.
Breathing with her entrails glittering on the tongue that greets us, Piña as incarnated mountain-being conjures dances as a catalog of movements-with-the-other which are part of the complex being which is (with) the Apu mountain.
Traditional ritual dances, unlike what their name seems to suggest, don’t remain static. Rather, each body that dances it transforms the dance, and so the dance continues to grow like a living being. These dances constitute a body-based knowledge that understands ‘humans’ as having been artificially separated from ‘nature’, and recognizes symbiotic relations to other earth-beings, maintaining an invested relationality with the whole of the cosmos. As practices of reciprocity that retain an awareness of our radical interdependence, and where the artistic is spiritual, social, functional and worldly, intertwined with all spheres of life. Facing the current multiple socioecological crises, we urgently need artistic practices that invite us (as Climatic Dances does) to take another look at how, in certain modes of existing, thinking, and moving with others, alternative ways of creating knowledge might surface.
Anti*Colonial Fantasies / Decolonial Strategies brings together artists from different diasporas, students and lecturers, who engage with a critique of the repercussions of colonialism—including in academia—and the quest for transforming this reality.
Working with various media—performances, videos, installations, paintings, photographs, drawings, and writing—as well as participatory formats, the artists expose ways in which colonialism persists today. Raising questions of race, sexuality, gender, spirituality, space, and time, they occupy themselves with the imagination and possibility of alternative realities and pursue decolonial strategies of resistance and knowledge production.
With contributions by: Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Gerardo Montes de Oca, Imayna Caceres, Sunanda Mesquita, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Amoako Boafo, Stephanie Misa, Sandra Monterroso, Tatiana Nascimento, Ezgi Erol, Firas Shehadeh, Hansel Sato, Sophie Utikal, Rini Mitra, Mariel Rodríguez, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Cana Bilir-Meier, Pêdra Costa, and Eduardo Triviño Cely.
Anti*Colonial Fantasies is a student and lecturer initiative that is part of a history of decolonial, postcolonial, antiracist initiatives at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and within Austria. It belongs to a genealogy of artistic works produced by BPoC (Black and People of Color) and migrant artists that seek to transform the contexts and spaces they occupy. These interventions seek to address colonialism and racism from within the centers of hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge. The activist protagonists of this history of BPoC political actions are from different diasporas and move within the realm of arts where they affirm BPoC identity.
In this work, I relate to the path of conocimiento, a concept developed by Gloria Anzaldúa, which... more In this work, I relate to the path of conocimiento, a concept developed by Gloria Anzaldúa, which is a form of spiritual inquiry/activism, reached via creative acts—writing, art-making, dancing, healing, teaching, meditation, and spiritual activism. In writing and drawing, I weave lines to different realities: the rural upbringings of the women who raised me, my migration from the Third World, the meaning of home and belonging, and my connection to all that exists on the planet as political consciousness.
Anti*Colonial Fantasies - Decolonial Strategies Editors: Imayna Caceres, Sunanda Mesquita, Sophie... more Anti*Colonial Fantasies - Decolonial Strategies Editors: Imayna Caceres, Sunanda Mesquita, Sophie Utikal Anti*Colonial Fantasies / Decolonial Strategies brings together artists from different diasporas, students and lecturers, who engage with a critique of the repercussions of colonialism—including in academia—and the quest for transforming this reality. Working with various media—performances, videos, installations, paintings, photographs, drawings, and writing—as well as participatory formats, the artists expose ways in which colonialism persists today. Raising questions of race, sexuality, gender, spirituality, space, and time, they occupy themselves with the imagination and possibility of alternative realities and pursue decolonial strategies of resistance and knowledge production. With contributions by: Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Gerardo Montes de Oca, Imayna Caceres, Sunanda Mesquita, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Amoako Boafo, Stephanie Misa, Sandra Monterroso, Tatiana Nascimento, Ezgi Erol, Firas Shehadeh, Hansel Sato, Sophie Utikal, Rini Mitra, Mariel Rodríguez, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Cana Bilir-Meier, Pêdra Costa, and Eduardo Triviño Cely. Anti*Colonial Fantasies is a student and lecturer initiative that is part of a history of decolonial, postcolonial, antiracist initiatives at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and within Austria. It belongs to a genealogy of artistic works produced by BPoC (Black and People of Color) and migrant artists that seek to transform the contexts and spaces they occupy. These interventions seek to address colonialism and racism from within the centers of hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge. The activist protagonists of this history of BPoC political actions are from different diasporas and move within the realm of arts where they affirm BPoC identity.
Periskop – Forum for kunsthistorisk debat, Dec 28, 2020
Researching through drawing about practices of political relationality to other ways of being in ... more Researching through drawing about practices of political relationality to other ways of being in the world. In this case, mestizo-Indigenous practices that stem from Amazonian Andean worlds and that have for long engaged with knowledge that is produced by other-than-humans. The findings presented were experienced as lessons gathered in the interaction with other-than-human beings, situations, and events. Can academic discussion aspire to validity when discussions about reality only happen between humans, in the absence of other non-human agents of history that build reality along with us?
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This exhibition project carried the aim to familiarize a larger audience with the work of Gloria Anzaldúa as well as to share the centrality of her drawings for her theoretical work. The project’s aim was to underline a sense of resonant community while, in parallel, highlighting the faculties of Anzaldúa not only as a writer and poet but as an artista chamana. We approached artistic practices as connected to spiritual activism, practices that contemplate multidimensional ways of understanding knowledge, that connect curating/curar to healing as an indigenous and transfeminist tradition, and that contribute, through a plurality of myths, to the reconfiguration of a new consciousness. We highlight artists (indigenous, black, queer, and trans) with links to Abya Yala that resonate with several of Anzaldúa’s known theoretical reflections, such as borderlands, auto-historia, making faces/ haciendo caras, Coyolxauhqui Imperative, Coatlicue State, as well as indigenous mythologies.
© All rights of the works are reserved to their respective authors.
In this issue, the invited artists share a deep preoccupation with the intersection of political, sexual, ecological and spiritual realms. Their works push the association between Third-World, racialized, gendered bodies and colonial history, political activism and ancestral references, sexual politics and mystical sources. With a performative approach centered on the body, the artistic acts are acts of communion, as much as acts of rupture. Here, the ritual is the moment of fusion of the separate spheres in which we exist; where subterranean pains and memories come to the surface, questioning the dominant sense of reality, and becoming turmoil before making sense as a whole.
In curating this issue we have approached the artistic and theoretical reflections of two iconic figures: the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, and the Chicana author and artist Gloria Anzaldúa. For Anzaldúa, her job as an artist “is to bear witness to what haunts us, to step back and attempt to see the pattern in these events (personal and societal) and how we can repair el daño (the damage) by using the imagination and its vision.” In tune, for Mendieta, art’s greatest value is its spiritual role: “My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.”
As artists and curators, our praxis contemplates multidimensional ways of understanding knowledge that connects art to healing, and that contributes to the reconfiguration of a new consciousness.
Parabol by Section D.
With the support of Rotor.
Aire. El aire se mueve y lleva vida, transportando conocimiento y otros mundos. Aire que baila, dibuja, esculpe y diseña. Los vientos nos recuerdan que todo está en constante movimiento. Que las cosas que construimos pueden convertirse fácilmente en temporales, y que cada reordenación de lo que nos rodea es una lección sobre no tomar las cosas por sentadas. Y si nuestras cosas se mueven tan fácilmente es porque al final, no son realmente nuestras. Que la las fronteras son porosas. Si los vientos pueden enseñar esto, es porque en primer lugar, desde tiempos inmemoriales, ellos han sido los primeros en saberlo.
(p.185-194) Anti*Colonial Fantasies/Decolonial Strategies engaged in a critique of the consequences of colonialism, as well as in the imagination and possibility of alternative realities.
"I relate the term ‘curation’ to the word 'curación', which is Spanish for 'healing', as in a process of transformation that passes through the body and implies the development of a new consciousness. (..) In this frame, I see the role of the curator as moderating and intervening in a community of senses, undoing, questioning and getting involved in a wider political work for re-imagining society. (..) from rage and indignation, to vulnerability and self-care. We need a common sensibility that allows us to understand and make space for all these responses and expressions."
Breathing with her entrails glittering on the tongue that greets us, Piña as incarnated mountain-being conjures dances as a catalog of movements-with-the-other which are part of the complex being which is (with) the Apu mountain.
Traditional ritual dances, unlike what their name seems to suggest, don’t remain static. Rather, each body that dances it transforms the dance, and so the dance continues to grow like a living being. These dances constitute a body-based knowledge that understands ‘humans’ as having been artificially separated from ‘nature’, and recognizes symbiotic relations to other earth-beings, maintaining an invested relationality with the whole of the cosmos. As practices of reciprocity that retain an awareness of our radical interdependence, and where the artistic is spiritual, social, functional and worldly, intertwined with all spheres of life. Facing the current multiple socioecological crises, we urgently need artistic practices that invite us (as Climatic Dances does) to take another look at how, in certain modes of existing, thinking, and moving with others, alternative ways of creating knowledge might surface.
Imayna Caceres about Climatic Dances by Amanda Piña / nadaproductions
https://tqw.at/multispecies-dance-movements-through-endangered-worlds/
Editors: Imayna Caceres, Sunanda Mesquita, Sophie Utikal
Anti*Colonial Fantasies / Decolonial Strategies brings together artists from different diasporas, students and lecturers, who engage with a critique of the repercussions of colonialism—including in academia—and the quest for transforming this reality.
Working with various media—performances, videos, installations, paintings, photographs, drawings, and writing—as well as participatory formats, the artists expose ways in which colonialism persists today. Raising questions of race, sexuality, gender, spirituality, space, and time, they occupy themselves with the imagination and possibility of alternative realities and pursue decolonial strategies of resistance and knowledge production.
With contributions by: Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Gerardo Montes de Oca, Imayna Caceres, Sunanda Mesquita, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Amoako Boafo, Stephanie Misa, Sandra Monterroso, Tatiana Nascimento, Ezgi Erol, Firas Shehadeh, Hansel Sato, Sophie Utikal, Rini Mitra, Mariel Rodríguez, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Cana Bilir-Meier, Pêdra Costa, and Eduardo Triviño Cely.
Anti*Colonial Fantasies is a student and lecturer initiative that is part of a history of decolonial, postcolonial, antiracist initiatives at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and within Austria. It belongs to a genealogy of artistic works produced by BPoC (Black and People of Color) and migrant artists that seek to transform the contexts and spaces they occupy. These interventions seek to address colonialism and racism from within the centers of hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge. The activist protagonists of this history of BPoC political actions are from different diasporas and move within the realm of arts where they affirm BPoC identity.
This exhibition project carried the aim to familiarize a larger audience with the work of Gloria Anzaldúa as well as to share the centrality of her drawings for her theoretical work. The project’s aim was to underline a sense of resonant community while, in parallel, highlighting the faculties of Anzaldúa not only as a writer and poet but as an artista chamana. We approached artistic practices as connected to spiritual activism, practices that contemplate multidimensional ways of understanding knowledge, that connect curating/curar to healing as an indigenous and transfeminist tradition, and that contribute, through a plurality of myths, to the reconfiguration of a new consciousness. We highlight artists (indigenous, black, queer, and trans) with links to Abya Yala that resonate with several of Anzaldúa’s known theoretical reflections, such as borderlands, auto-historia, making faces/ haciendo caras, Coyolxauhqui Imperative, Coatlicue State, as well as indigenous mythologies.
© All rights of the works are reserved to their respective authors.
In this issue, the invited artists share a deep preoccupation with the intersection of political, sexual, ecological and spiritual realms. Their works push the association between Third-World, racialized, gendered bodies and colonial history, political activism and ancestral references, sexual politics and mystical sources. With a performative approach centered on the body, the artistic acts are acts of communion, as much as acts of rupture. Here, the ritual is the moment of fusion of the separate spheres in which we exist; where subterranean pains and memories come to the surface, questioning the dominant sense of reality, and becoming turmoil before making sense as a whole.
In curating this issue we have approached the artistic and theoretical reflections of two iconic figures: the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, and the Chicana author and artist Gloria Anzaldúa. For Anzaldúa, her job as an artist “is to bear witness to what haunts us, to step back and attempt to see the pattern in these events (personal and societal) and how we can repair el daño (the damage) by using the imagination and its vision.” In tune, for Mendieta, art’s greatest value is its spiritual role: “My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.”
As artists and curators, our praxis contemplates multidimensional ways of understanding knowledge that connects art to healing, and that contributes to the reconfiguration of a new consciousness.
Parabol by Section D.
With the support of Rotor.
Aire. El aire se mueve y lleva vida, transportando conocimiento y otros mundos. Aire que baila, dibuja, esculpe y diseña. Los vientos nos recuerdan que todo está en constante movimiento. Que las cosas que construimos pueden convertirse fácilmente en temporales, y que cada reordenación de lo que nos rodea es una lección sobre no tomar las cosas por sentadas. Y si nuestras cosas se mueven tan fácilmente es porque al final, no son realmente nuestras. Que la las fronteras son porosas. Si los vientos pueden enseñar esto, es porque en primer lugar, desde tiempos inmemoriales, ellos han sido los primeros en saberlo.
(p.185-194) Anti*Colonial Fantasies/Decolonial Strategies engaged in a critique of the consequences of colonialism, as well as in the imagination and possibility of alternative realities.
"I relate the term ‘curation’ to the word 'curación', which is Spanish for 'healing', as in a process of transformation that passes through the body and implies the development of a new consciousness. (..) In this frame, I see the role of the curator as moderating and intervening in a community of senses, undoing, questioning and getting involved in a wider political work for re-imagining society. (..) from rage and indignation, to vulnerability and self-care. We need a common sensibility that allows us to understand and make space for all these responses and expressions."
Breathing with her entrails glittering on the tongue that greets us, Piña as incarnated mountain-being conjures dances as a catalog of movements-with-the-other which are part of the complex being which is (with) the Apu mountain.
Traditional ritual dances, unlike what their name seems to suggest, don’t remain static. Rather, each body that dances it transforms the dance, and so the dance continues to grow like a living being. These dances constitute a body-based knowledge that understands ‘humans’ as having been artificially separated from ‘nature’, and recognizes symbiotic relations to other earth-beings, maintaining an invested relationality with the whole of the cosmos. As practices of reciprocity that retain an awareness of our radical interdependence, and where the artistic is spiritual, social, functional and worldly, intertwined with all spheres of life. Facing the current multiple socioecological crises, we urgently need artistic practices that invite us (as Climatic Dances does) to take another look at how, in certain modes of existing, thinking, and moving with others, alternative ways of creating knowledge might surface.
Imayna Caceres about Climatic Dances by Amanda Piña / nadaproductions
https://tqw.at/multispecies-dance-movements-through-endangered-worlds/
Editors: Imayna Caceres, Sunanda Mesquita, Sophie Utikal
Anti*Colonial Fantasies / Decolonial Strategies brings together artists from different diasporas, students and lecturers, who engage with a critique of the repercussions of colonialism—including in academia—and the quest for transforming this reality.
Working with various media—performances, videos, installations, paintings, photographs, drawings, and writing—as well as participatory formats, the artists expose ways in which colonialism persists today. Raising questions of race, sexuality, gender, spirituality, space, and time, they occupy themselves with the imagination and possibility of alternative realities and pursue decolonial strategies of resistance and knowledge production.
With contributions by: Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Gerardo Montes de Oca, Imayna Caceres, Sunanda Mesquita, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Amoako Boafo, Stephanie Misa, Sandra Monterroso, Tatiana Nascimento, Ezgi Erol, Firas Shehadeh, Hansel Sato, Sophie Utikal, Rini Mitra, Mariel Rodríguez, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Cana Bilir-Meier, Pêdra Costa, and Eduardo Triviño Cely.
Anti*Colonial Fantasies is a student and lecturer initiative that is part of a history of decolonial, postcolonial, antiracist initiatives at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and within Austria. It belongs to a genealogy of artistic works produced by BPoC (Black and People of Color) and migrant artists that seek to transform the contexts and spaces they occupy. These interventions seek to address colonialism and racism from within the centers of hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge. The activist protagonists of this history of BPoC political actions are from different diasporas and move within the realm of arts where they affirm BPoC identity.