Yohanna M RoaRoa
I am a visual artist, curator and art historian with a feminist-decentralized approach and archival perspectives. My artistic practices aspire to produce changes in how we reflect, organize, and write about the past, particularly the history of art and our bodies. Being a Latin American woman is a specific political and social framework within this historical-conceptual construction that mediates my world experience. My work focuses on activating decolonial processes; the goal is to rescue or point out the memories, the knowledge and even the hidden or obscured bodies in the history writing processes. Traditionally, women have inherited knowledge through words and teaching in everyday spaces such as cooking or sewing. Based on this recognition, I define my artistic practices under the concept of “activist fabrics,” where textile practices are feminist political action devices. I am interested in pointing out that everyday activities and spaces, such as food, decoration, and care, are places to rescue stories connected to events of social magnitude. Those spaces and memories allow me to put on the table the connections between personal experiences and the sociopolitical structures, showing that the spaces considered individual and disconnected are actually social and structural.