Feminist Aesthetics of Protest in Contemporary Chile
The Forum is pleased to join with the Wallach Art Gallery to present Feminist Aesthetics of Protest in Contemporary Chile, a virtual program organized in conjunction with the The Protest and The Recuperation: A Preview, a view-from-the-street exhibit on display at The Forum through April 4, 2021.
Over the last decade, Chile has experienced a succession of popular uprisings, including the 2011 student protests, the Tsunami feminista in 2018, and ongoing national demonstrations under the banner of Chile Despertó. In this social climate, a number of artistic and activist collectives and performance street groups have emerged throughout the country. Using dance, theater, performance, and music as their political weapons, these collectives are flooding the streets of Chile to denounce systemic cases of governamental violence and existing patriarchal, colonialist and neoliberal structures. This panel will examine the emergence of these collectives and how they are developing a lively and impassioned protest aesthetic as part of their artistic and activist practices.
Panelists:
- Baila Capucha Baila is a Chilean feminist collective. Founded in November 2019 within the framework of the Popular Revolt of that year, it is a self-managed group of women and dissidents. Munay, co-founder and spokeswoman, is representing the collective at this presentation.
- Marcela A. Fuentes is a performance scholar and artist from Argentina currently based in Chicago where she holds the position of Associate Professor at Northwestern University’s School of Communication. Her areas of research include tactical media, social art tactics, social movements, digital performance, theories of embodiment, and feminist and queer performance. Fuentes’s most recent publication, Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America (University of Michigan Press, 2019; Eterna Cadencia, 2020), analyzes tactical media and performance in contemporary protests and activisms and maps the entanglement between on- and off-line organization and mobilization in Latin American revolutionary movements.
- Eugenia Vargas-Pereira is a Chilean photographer and performance artist based in Santiago, Chile and Tucson, Arizona. Vargas-Pereira’s work engages with organic materiality, the community, the female body against systems of dominance technology, and environmental degradation. Her transdisciplinary work combines performance, photo-performance and photography, and installation and video, and focuses on issues of gender, natural environments, and mediated culture.
Moderator:
- María José Contreras Lorenzini is a performance artist and professor in the Theater School at the Catholic University in Chile, as well as an actress and theatre director. Her creative work and her research focus on the relationship between the body, memory and performance. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University.
The presentation of The Protest and The Recuperation: A Preview and the virtual public program, Feminist Aesthetics of Protest in Contemporary Chile, is the result of a partnership between The Forum and the Wallach Art Gallery. The program is organized with the assistance of Marina Avia Estrada.
The Protest and The Recuperation preview includes a selection of 11 pieces from the upcoming exhibit. The work on view, which includes an artist's video, a sculpture, and nine reproductions of works in the exhibition, is visible from the sidewalks along Broadway and W. 125th Street. While The Forum building remains closed due to the pandemic, we are pleased to display these powerful pieces of art in our windows for all to experience and contemplate.
Click here to learn more about The Protest and The Recuperation.
