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Art to question and reconcile again and again with the misak culture

2023-02-24T10:45:40.728Z


The artist Julieth Morales interweaves her indigenous and mestizo part in a work that rejects the machismo of the customs with which she grew up and criticizes the exoticization of her community


Misak artist Julieth Morales, in Popayán (Colombia). Picasa (Courtesy)

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Julieth Morales's life seems to have been shaped by endless contradictions.

As a child, she heard her mother tell her angrily that she was “more mestizo than indigenous” and she never taught her her language so that she would not be rejected outside the community, as had happened to her.

The women in her family always encouraged her to study at the university, and when she moved to Popayán, to study Arts, she reproached him for being far from her.

The search for identity has itself been a contradiction.

She left never to return and now her work is a continuous return.

To the mingas, to weaving, to the rituals, to the chambe... A return to the roots but full of questions.

“Art has allowed me to question myself which of everything they said was me is truly mine,” she says.

He is 30 years old and grew up in the Guambía reservation, in the municipality of Silvia, in the northeast of the department of Cauca.

He belongs to the Misak people, an indigenous community that since the end of the 20th century has led political struggles to recover their lands and traditions, and that is why his art moves between the urban and the rural, rejecting the exoticization with which the original towns.

His work, which mixes

performance

, weaving, photography and serigraphs, will be exhibited at the El Dorado gallery, in downtown Bogotá, until February 28.

Her analysis started from the individual, being her naked body the first support of the artist.

“We all fear the body.

We cover it up all the time, but for me it was very necessary to strip it down and show it off.

Show myself as the woman I am now and not the girl who was singled out so many times, ”she says by video call.

One of the key elements of this first phase was the chumbe, a kind of sash woven by women with which pregnant women wrap their guts and children from the navel at birth.

“It is true that it protects the body and the spirit but it does not allow movement either”, she narrates.

One of the fabrics of the misak artist Julieth Morales, exhibited at the El Dorado gallery, in downtown Bogotá.Courtesy

Morales takes her own chumbé and asks that the women in her family lend her theirs and uses them for a

photo performance

in which she undresses and wraps herself around them, leaving her breasts exposed and covering her eyes.

“I did it this way to correct traditional demands in a utopian way, and to belong to my territory without prejudice.

But also to expose a proposal of the new woman that is being built”.

“Why are you doing this?” asked her mom, who also hinted that it would only make more women go “libertines” like her.

“I needed to get rid of all that.

From that finger that judges, ”she says.

Decline.

Wonder.

Getting closer.

reconcile

Going back and forth from their culture has been a constant.

Involve the women in your community as well.

“A lot of the ideas started in conversations in the kitchen,” she says.

“They began to participate and get closer to the project.

One of them told me that she never thought that such a young woman would want to listen to them or tell what they experience.

I realized that what we all agree on is the need to preserve our memory.

The conversation about how and what we conserve is beginning to take place.

And I am glad that they are in that rethinking”.

Men, however, are never protagonists in his work.

They barely appear in his work;

at least you can't see them.

The only project in which he put them at the center was his reinvention of the Mojigangas, a popular festival in which men (only they) dress up as different characters from the Western world as a mockery of the settlers.

It is a ritual of memory and resistance in which colorful masks and decorations normally related to women are placed, but they are not allowed to participate.

Series of photographs taken by the artist Julieth Morales, exhibited at the El Dorado gallery. Courtesy

In her project, she wore them herself and invited the community to participate in a dance in which, this time, the protagonists were women.

The men only played the instruments.

“The men were somewhat confused.

On the one hand, they were happy that I wanted to rescue this tradition, which right now has lost all its meaning due to the strong presence of alcohol, but on the other, they were outraged that they were also part of it, ”she says.

“I wanted to reverse the roles.

It is something that is not customary to do.

Disturb for the sole purpose of including”.

And she adds: “The entire indigenous worldview is centered on balance, also on feminine and masculine energy.

Excluding or relegating ourselves to care and knitting goes against our beliefs.”

Criticism is not only within.

For Morales it was also quite a job trying to dismantle the imagery that is held of indigenous communities outside of them.

The native peoples, he says, are always narrated from linearity and exoticism.

“It tells how we eat, how we sleep, how we live”, she laughs ironically.

“Since college, she felt that, because he was indigenous, he had to do 'indigenous things.'

Knitting, marrying young, being a mother quickly… I wanted to do the complete opposite”.

For Morales, much remains to be done.

But she has experienced firsthand that reconciliation with the identity that conflicted with her and the rejection of a violence that is also present in the construction of the family.

“It's easier to know who I am after all the questions I've asked myself.

Art was the channel”.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-02-24

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