Art & Feminism: Connecting Europe and Latin America

The Latin America is Moving collective (LAM) organised two online events entitled Art and Feminism: Connecting Europe and Latin America on the 19th and the 24th of November, 2022. The seminars were funded by the Eeva & Martti Ahtisaari fund from Kansan Sivistysrahasto, Finland, as part of their/our international solidarity work.

The events united people from different European and Latin American countries. During the seminars, they explored how art, performance, and academic approaches draw connections between feminism, Nature and diaspora. The first session featured performance dance, in discussion with the Cuban-German performance art dancer Ana Kavalis and focused on migration. The second session centred around female leadership and art in collaborative practice in conversation with the Boas Práticas project in Brazil and Somos La Colectiva based in Finland.

The LAM collective organized these seminars because it felt the need to draw attention to anti-extractivist feminism. At the mark of the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) and Biodiversity Conference (COP15), we wanted to highlight the voices that emphasise the inseparability of Nature and climate and resist the co-optation of environmentalism by extractivist interests.

The artists and activists who presented their work engage with feminist, social and political themes and use art to reduce power disparities through its ability to deconstruct, tell another story, catalyse and cure. Their art shows that patriarchal subjectivities and structures can be addressed through reflection on oneself and one’s community. Art and care are the prime means of feminist collectives for rebuilding connections in a world disconnected from Nature, which is simultaneously mobile, and where people are constantly searching for a community.

Common themes that ran through the performances, presentations, artistic interventions and discussions were dissolving the body-mind and culture-nature dualism and recentering the focus on permeability, nurture, birth and rebirth. Art, in these instances, is used to transcend the norms created by written language, as it is a form of communication that defies the limits of hegemonic forms of knowledge.

Art & Feminism with Ana Kavalis on the 19^th of November

The first session on the 19th of November opened with the performance “Espiritas Migrantas” by Ana Kavalis. Ana is a performance artist and teacher based in Berlin. In her work, she aims to create a physicality where there is no division between body-mind and body-voice but a fluid, permeable whole. She combines Butoh dance, physical theatre, improvisation, instant composition, breathwork, meditation and somatic bodywork in her practice.

The filmed performance “Espiritas Migrantas” we presented to our audience talked about the psychological effects of migration. We asked the audience to take notes of their ideas, feelings and associations evoked by the video.

After the video, Raphael Schapira commented on the themes that appeared in the performance, which included the spirits (music of rolling stones, water, transformation, energy, union), loneliness and insistence, not fitting in (but trying to construct a future nonetheless), giving birth and coming into the world (migration as a symbol of rebirth), and the creation myth.

In the following discussion, Ana Kavalis spoke of how art deals with representations of womanhood. In her work, she has been interested in why, for instance, in myths women are sacrificed to Earth and why they become monsters?Yet in myths, the world is also created by women supporting each other in creating. This leads Ana to explore in her art things that come from our bodies and the experience of giving birth.

Ana’s performance also spoke of the myths and goddesses women create. The women in “Espiritas Migrantas” work with Coatlicue, the Aztec Earth Goddess of Life and Death. Gloria Anzaldua’s book “Borderlands/La Frontera” has greatly inspired her.

The act of migration is a form of rebirth related to the theme of creation. Similar to giving birth, one needs to push oneself to keep going. Migration also ties into the historical ways birth is treated; like the act of migration, female bodies have been monitored. Each migrant and mother, however, keeps different experiences. Yet, while the experiences of women giving birth are also particular and contextual, they tie women into a tight bond. Ana felt a connection to her mother in revolutionary Cuba when she became a mother in Berlin.

Ana seeks to create not only a mental connection with the audience in her artistic work but also connects through evoking sensations and empathy. Since she was little, Ana has been using dance to interact with her surroundings and connect with others.

The session on exploring the dissolution of the body-mind connection culminated in a participatory activity carried out by Ana, where the attendees got to explore their body-mind relationship through a somatic exercise that included silencing and connecting with one’s body.

You can visit Ana Kavalis’ personal website to find more about her work at http://www.anakavalis.com

Art & Feminism with Boas Práticas & Somos La Colectiva on the 24th of November

The Second session on the 24th of November looked at how art is used in collective work, showcasing the work of the community-based collective Boas Práticas and the artistic collective Somos La Colectiva.

First, the Boas Práticas collective based in North-Eastern Brazil explored topics on Nature, feminism, and art. Boas Práticas works with seven communities with different cultural and work backgrounds in three northeastern Brazilian states: Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba and Ceará. The communities explore how to create a counter-narrative to extractive capitalism through solidarity, assemblies, art, performance, poetry and ancestral rituals. The project has published on communities’ responses to COVID, epistemic plurality, social movements and citizenship.

Teresa, Jocy, Raquel & Ana talked about their individual work. Their presentation entitled “Female Protagonism, Arts of Inhabiting Territories, and the Embodied Pedagogies of Struggle” contested the very idea of Nature as a Westernised concept. In their view, this concept constructs Nature in opposition to culture and locates it outside ourselves. Instead, they work with the concept of territories embodied in the daily struggle of the collectives.

“Within those territories, what we understand as ‘art’ is not an utopian ideal, but is rooted in the works, the struggles, and the personal and rituals that feed the spirituality of the collectives we are in dialogue with.”

The Boas Práticas collective seeks to reinforce the role of artistic manifestations as a way of being and inhabiting the world merged with the daily and collective struggles of different groups. They spoke about women’s protagonism in care politics, making the social fabric, sustaining different strategies for the art of living, and engaging with non-human and more-than-human worlds.

The pedagogies of struggle, building on the work of Paulo Freire, underline their work ethic. It can be described as a form of affection that aggregates and motivates, works on recognising past and present precarity and injustices, and proposes practices of mutual partnership. In the words of bell hooks, the collectives “revisit love daily” by engaging with those pedagogies, cultivating a permeable humanity.

The presentation mentioned the work of Taliria Petrone, who states that feminism cannot disregard the colonial history of Brazil. In this history, models of “universality” persist, materialised in the “man, white, patriarchal, heterosexual, Christian, owner, leaving out different faces and subjects, especially women”.

The Collective also raised the question of the unequal production and circulation of ideas in a geopolitically segmented world. The project works towards recognising “other” pieces of knowledge from traditional communities and social movements, the formal recognition of community leaders as researchers, and the importance of financial compensation.

We also got to hear a positive message from female leaders: Josefa from the Recycling for Life Community Association, Sandra and Jaine from the Tabajara indigenous community in Quiterianópolis, Ceará, and Luanda from the National Movement of the Population in Situation of Homelessness. The video ended with Luanda’s song about love, heat and connection with Mother Earth.

Jocy finished the session by highlighting how art is essential in community organising because it is not knowledge imposed on us. It is the knowledge that comes from us.

To find out more about Boas Práticas project, visit their website here.

In the session’s second part, we got to know the work of Somos La Colectiva, and Rosamaria & Ana were present from La Colectiva to talk about their artistic work.

Somos la Colectiva is a collective of female Latin American artists based in Finland doing art projects on “roots”, “destination”, and “home” by combining audiovisual works with poetry. They opened their session with a beautiful and curious film clip combining visual and sound work called “Mixtas y Radicales”.

The clip portrays several members of the Collective using different natural and urban backgrounds to reveal the many layers or versions of themselves. The poetic images evoke the idea that migrants create different versions of themselves in diverse contexts.

While doing the video, Somos la Colectiva was inspired by a DNA test that revealed their ancestry’s complex background of migration and cultural heritage. Their roots span from the Amazon to Nigeria and the Balkans; they underlined that such a mixture is not uncommon for the Latin American experience.

Ana, who works with sound, spoke of the audio side of “Mixtas y Radicales”. In Finland, she has been confronted with a silence she has not been used to before: people are silent, and the surrounding environment lacks familiar noises. The audio in the “Mixtas y Radicales” was compiled from the sounds the members of La Colectiva miss and like.

Rosamaria also talked about their book “Muistikuvat” (memory pictures), which surged partly in response to the lack of representation they felt when policymakers and others spoke of “migrants” and the “Latin American community”. For Rosamaria, art was an excellent way to tell the stories of the migrants and make themselves heard.

At the start of the discussion, Rosamaria took a stand of solidarity with the Iranian women, drawing attention to the continued ways women suffer from violence in their daily lives and the need for international solidarity. When Mexican women started to come out together in 2013 against gender-based violence, the artists and researchers of Somos La Colectiva began to look into ways to act in support of the broader feminist movements taking place in Latin America and worldwide.

They collaborate with different collectives in Finland, such as the Plus Collective or the Red de Mujeres. These collectives based are multicultural and share different ideas and visions. Yet they share the sentiment of getting together out of frustration about the current situation and joining forces with groups with other ideas and visions. At the discussion, Henrike Neuhaus highlighted how it correlates to the way that in the video of “Mixtas y Radicales”, migrants have different versions of themselves. You may not see the routes/roots that define their life history and the colonial paths in those histories.

To revisit Somos La Colectiva’s artwork, visit here

Text: Jasmin Immonen

Revision: Raphael Schapira