Las Migras de Abya Yala & Body Territories

1. Las Migras de Abya Yala (the women migrant of Abya Yala)

' The 'capucha' as an allie.

As symbol of feminist revolution.

As a fertile land for the creation of a new identity.

As the spearhead of a collective group that emerges from Abya Yala.

The mission: To bring patriarchy down!'

* translated extract from the text written by Lorena Chavez Alvarez.

Shot in a make-shift studio before the 2020 8M Women March in Barcelona.

I invited the women from my Latin American block to get their portrait taken before our marching started. I set up passport type of studio, with the interest of obtaining images that allow us to reclaim our identity as migrants, and as women supporting the battles in our territories of Abya Yala (the pre-columbus Americas). The 'capuchas' (hoods/masks) they wear were made by hand , and we crafted them together, each finding a way to show their identity and resistance through each design. Meanwhile, my friend and journalist, Lorena Chavez Alvarez, interviewed them to recollect their stories, which we new want to weave together in a zine publication, and a mural in collaboration with a textile artists and a mural artist.

2. Body-Territory.

For this project I invited Ignacia and Consuelo, dancers and movement artists, to embody and respond to what it feels like to be white passing mestizas. Mestizaje as a reminder of violence in our territories, of forced mixing during colonialism, but also as a reminder of our ancestors who resisted. Now, as women, as migrants, as Latin Americans, we reclaim our bodies. Our bodies are not territories for others to conquer. This project explores our relationship, me as a white passing Latin American too, with our skin that layer that hides or reveals our stories.

' I was born from an uncertain channel, towards the names of other names that named me. I was placed in a place limited by the straight lines of a fixed map, constructed centuries ago, and used everytime to please certainties and benefits. And it is in that spatiality that I appear, constructed from those bricks, used to those bricks, filled and emptied from thousands of earth cubicles. I try to deconstruct myself' * translated extract from the text written by Ignacia Verdugo.