Reflection

A persistent aspect of my current state is the focus on the body in relation with my identity as a female Colombian artist. I have been working on a dialogue between dance, poetry and fine arts. The still lasting consequences of the armed conflict and ubiquitous violent history of Colombia during more than 6 decades were part of the contextual frame in first semester.

The recognition of some feminine handicraft practices (weaving and braiding) as legitimate forms of knowledge and exchange has been essential in my work. They contain a traditional value and an ancestral wisdom of black, indigenous, peasant and mestizo women in which family dynamics, collective and emancipation processes are involved in Colombia.

Some questions in my research arise from perspectives of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui1, who has made this question of identity her life’s work. She reflects on “decolonizing” practices and discourses. Some of those questions-encounters I have worked on are:

• -Is there any need for traditions in these times?

• -How does her approach of identity and the indigenous roots develop in my work?

• -How can I challenge my sense of identity within my background in relation to feminine cultural and my familiar practices?

• - Is it possible to reconcile myself with “my country” that is in historical debt with its women,who are not visible and recognised in our history as a nation?

• -How can I call "my country" if I do not want to be part of that conception of a nation?

1Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is an Aymara/Bolivian feminist sociologist/ historian/ activist of Aymara descent. She has a holistic center for research and production of alternative knowledge on the decolonization of the body, sociology of the image, and social activism.

In my changing perspective on these questions and practices, I began to delve into my biographical material. Then I might ask:

• -If the body has many implications for thinking about contemporary art, how can the construction of my body, of my bodies and their legacy, how can that also be resituated, or reset including all of the above questions?

• -How is my subjectivity not only my personal background, where I'm coming from, my heritage and my legacy but also a voice that reclaims its configuration? in its plurality?

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• -How to work with personal archives that can not yet be shared?

• -How can the performer(me) still give room to the images, the audience and myself to breathe, without getting trapped in my own content?

An artistic strategy I found is to dialogue with the image of a snake taking the curves/the course on the road. Yéndome por las ramas. To meander.

I have generated my body research in the face of paradoxes and frustrations coming from ways of living, to the stereotypes that my individual contradictions offer from contemporary art, creative manifestations that include emotions, memories and conversations.

The vulnerability and fragility in the violence can also have nuances and open space for imagination. The methaphores of it can bring also diferent textures and objects.

What do this objects carry on them?

How objects of my daily life can hold the space where things hat happened, and at the same time, be hold by the space and the performer?

The archives and memories carry narratives and what stays on this narratives could be in transformation.

At the beginning of last year, I focused on Colombian history marked by forced displacement, exile, abandonment of the territory, oblivion and impunity.

However, in the next phase of my process I want to emphasize that history of Colombia that has notoriously also witnessed resistance, hope, reconciliation and the reception of other cultures for the construction of the peace process.

Therefore, I realized that I needed to change the direction of my performative devices. Even though the history of war contains atrocious archives, at the same time it has another site that allows poetry, textures and nuances and subtlety. I use performative language as a reconfiguration of the notion of body, here it is posible the use of objects, and an installion gesture of the body that is being in constant change.

Perhaps the objects hold the narratives allowing me to distance from the past?

In this way I wish to generate for my work, as it happens in the history of Colombia, another way of relating to pain, trauma and violence.

Perhaps the space to build poetics lies in the strength of transformation, in resilience, in hope and in the healing process. One consequence of trauma is the separation. In this case my artistic response is based on my own ancestral and familiar handcraft practices such as weaving, knitting and braiding.

If the challenge has to do with healing transgenerational trauma, this implies that we are relational beings. And probably the questions are about how to reconnect, how to generate relationships in order to create a sense of community with our environment? What is the role of art and educational programs in this reconciliation?