15 works / 3 programs at GIV / 4001 rue Berri local 105, Montréal info@givideo.org
Free and open to the public.
Three days of screenings and exchanges on feminist and activist art in Latin America with the curator.
This project has been made possible through the Accueil d’œuvres et d’artistes provenant de l’étranger program of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
1/ THE PIONEERS Las Pioneras / Les pionnières / September 8, 2015 – 19 h_GIV
Program dedicated to the pioneers of Latin American feminist art of the 70s and 80s, some having been dominant figures in the artistic and intellectual scene.
Ciudad Mujer Ciudad
Pola Weiss, 1978, 18 min 40 s, art video, Spanish, French s.t.
Dance performance video, expressing the difficult transition of women from the countryside to the megalopolis of Mexico City.
Pola Weiss (1947-1990). A pioneer of video art in Mexico, her work was rejected by the intellectual circles of the time. It was after meeting Nam June Paik and Shigeko Kubota in New York that she made her first video, Fleur Cosmique, in 1977. She not only opened a new path of research in the audio-visual field, but also explored transdisciplinarity, performanceand dance.
¿Y si es mujer?
Guadalupe Sánchez Sosa, 1977, 6 min 27 s, animation, Spanish, French s.t.
Short animation on the role of women in patriarchal culture.
Guadalupe Sánchez Sosa (Cordoba, Mexico, 1955). Her work includes graphic art, animation, art direction in film and exploration of traditional and digital animation techniques. Her projects integrate experiences she lived during her research, linked mainly to children, women, and education. She was a member of the Cine Mujer Collective.
Juguetes
Maria Luisa Bemberg, 1978, 11 min 39 s, documentary, Spanish, French s.t.
This short work looks at the influence of toys on young minds and their impact on the subsequent vocational choices of children and was made following 70 interviews with 9 and 10-year-old boys and girls at the Toy Fair during the Buenos Aires Agricultural Fair (Argentina).
María Luisa Bemberg (1922- 1995). Feminist, scriptwriter, director, and actress, she was one of the first female Latin American directors, as well as an important figure in Argentinian intellectual circles from 1970 to 1990. She initiated the discussion of an important social debate as co-founder of Unión Feminista Argentina, the legendary UFA and participated in different campaigns to raise awareness of the constraints that traditional societal roles created for women as autonomous individuals. Her works propose a universal theme on the desire for independence of her heroines, forcing them to confront established power structures.
El arte en rosa. Mujeres en las artes visuales: Maris Bustamante
Mónica Mayer and Sachiko Uzeta, 2008, 26 min, TV program, Spanish, French s.t.
Conceived as a television series, El arte en rosa looks at the life and works of female Mexican artists. Approached from a political stance, their art is also analyzed from a human point of view by the protagonists. In this episode, Maris Bustamante, the “Grandma of Mexican performance art”, talks about her work and her training in the early 80s, of Polvo de Gallina Negra, the first feminist artistic group in Mexico.
Mónica Mayer was born in Mexico in 1945. She is considered to be a performance pioneer and a precursor of feminist art. With Maris Bustamante, she founded the Polvo de Gallina Negra group.
Sachiko Uzeta, director and producer, was one of the first graduates from the International School of Film and Television in San Antonio de los Baños in Cuba in the 80s.
2/ BORDER SHE IS Ella es frontera / Elle est frontière / September 9, 2015 – 18 h_GIV
Works by artists who, in the 90s, initiated a reflection on borders and the meaning of territories
Ella es frontera/Border she is
Pilar Rodríguez, 1996, 25 min, art video, Spanish- English
Cisneros, and Liliana Valenzuela. Beyond the words, the public is invited to travel through a body landscape.
Pilar Rodriguez, a poetess of words and video, interpreter and translator, cross-border aventuress… In 2005, she returned to her native Mexico after living in California, Texas, New Mexico and Morelos.
Mientras dormíamos (el caso Juárez)
Lorena Wolffer, Ximena Cuevas, Rogelio Sosa, 2002, 4 min 54 s, art video, English
Since the beginning of the 90s, more than 300 women have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez and a similar number of women have gone missing. The video reveals this dramatic situation, denouncing the permissiveness which still persists in Ciudad Juarez in regard to violence against women.
For over 20 years, the work of Lorena Wolffer has been proposing a space of resistance and enunciation at the intersection of art and activism. From the creation radical cultural interventions with different women’s communities to the elaboration of new teaching models, her projects recognize the importance of experimental languages and move the boundaries between cultures. The artist tenaciously defends the rights and the voice of women generally invisible in the Mexican context
Nómadas, las mujeres se mueven 2
Elizabeth Ross, 2008-2009, 7 min 44 s, art video, English
This video looks at the endless female trajectory in the outside world as well as in their most intimate territories. The project was created in collaboration with artists working on questions of immigration.
Elizabeth Ross is a Mexican multi-disciplinary artist. Director of artistic projects, sociocultural agent, curator and journalist, her presence is international. Her approach includes ongoing research at the intersection of art, feminism, politics, memory, the environment and society. She organizes live and online events where “community” is the keyword. She is the founder and director of 5célula in Mexico and 3Multiverse in Europe, both non-profit organizations linking art and communities. She also founded Identités, an international residency. Since 2003, she has chosen to practice her art in the streets and public venues.
Santas Putas
Verónica Quense, 2010, 54 min, documentary, Spanish- English
This documentary is based on the disappearance and the murder of 14 women in Alto Hospicio, Iquique, in northern Chile, between September 12, 1998 and August 23, 2001. During the two and a half year time span of these crimes, the authorities who were supposed to protect these women and investigate the murders, did nothing. According to the government and the police, these women had gone off to work as prostitutes because they were poor. Many years later, five people, close to the victims, speak out.
Veronica Quense was born in Valparaiso, Chile, in 1961. Multi-faceted artist, defender of human and environmental rights, photographer and poetess, she focuses her camera where others turn away. Her first works, El vuelo de Juana (1997) and El canto olvidado (1998), fiction shorts already mirror her interest for the status of women in Chilean society. It is in her documentary work, however, that she finds the best vehicle to denounce the consequences of a misogynist and inequitable society.
3/THE NEW DE-GENERATION AND COUNTER-MANIFESTOS / LA NUEVA DES-GENERACIÓN Y SUS CONTRAMANIFIESTOS September 10 2015 – 19 h__GIV
A program of feminist works of the 2000s that look at notions of the aesthetic, the political body and sexuality to reveal its historicity.
Belleza v/s Belleza
Katia Sepúlveda, 2007, 3 min, art video, no dialog
This video is a reflection on the nature of beauty and contemporary perceptions of this ideal. The director looks at L’Origine du monde (1866), a painting by Gustave Courbet, where the vulva is the origin of the world and of beauty, and at the Barbie doll with its silhouette imposed as a standard of contemporary beauty. Vulvas are all different, and it is from this non-standardized “beauty” that the director confronts stereotypes.
Katia Sepúlveda Barra was born in Santiago de Chile in 1978. Katia works from a trans-feminist, anti-colonialist, post-porno and post-conceptual perspective, creating an ongoing dialogue with theory, criticism of fiction and counter-fiction. She is currently based in Tijuana, Mexico.
Compulsory maternity
Nadia Granados: La Fulminante, 2012, 3 min 47 s, art video, English
A monologue on the debate surrounding the decriminalization of abortion in Latin America. La Fulminante is a persona based on the stereotype of the sexually provocative Latin woman invented by mass media, the reggaethon and pornography. In this video, the artist’s body becomes an attraction, offering that which is not available in traditional communication networks.
Nadia Granados: La Fulminante, was born in Bogota in 1978. She is a performance artist who uses her body as a conduit for social transformation. She is interested in the relation between violence against women and the representation of violence in traditional media, institutionalized male chauvinism and heterosexual pornography.
Envío para el río Medellín
Ana María Agredo, 2014, 4 min 58 s, art video, no dialog
This video was inspired by a Selen Arango poem on the violence in Medellín, Colombia, where life and death are in free-fall.
Ana Maria Agredo, queer, feminist. Her research and artistic production focus on body issues and sexuality, viewed under the angle of decolonization, resistance and disobedience. Her projects look at radical writing and the acquisition of knowledge by way of undisciplined spaces versus sex education and art history. She is currently working on the stakes and concerns of Latin American queer thought.
Manifiesto Gordx
Constanza A Castillo and Samuel Hidalgo, 2012, 4 min 40 s, art video, Spanish- English
Manifiesto gordx is a counter-manifesto in favour of corpulent bodies. It is a call for corporal anarchy and politically incorrect hyperbole. It is a visual protest against the patriarchal standards of beauty.
Constance A. Castillo was born in Quilpué-Valparaiso, Chile. Lesbian militant, anarcho-feminist, performer and facilitator, her work centers around issues of politicization of corpulence and the body, heterosexuality as a political order and anti-patriarchal, antispeciesist and post-porno struggles.
Castigadores domésticos moderados
Alejandra Dorado, 2008, 11 min, art video, Spanish- French
The video tells the story of a woman and the men in her life. The slum, her first intimate relations, poverty, abuse, love, and the desire to move beyond her situation, until a tragic incident, where, she kills her husband in self-defence in front of her two sons. This work was born out of research on cases of violence where women, in self-defence, become the aggressors.
Alejandra Dorado, was born in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 1969. She is considered to be one of the most important contemporary Bolivian artists. In her installations and performances, Dorado examines questions of identity, gender and power. She is also the founder and director of La caja verde, an innovative art education program for blind youth
Aphrodisia
Malignas Influencias, 2008, 6 min 18 s, art video, English
This video is an invitation to test Aphrodisia, a urinal developed exclusively for women. It allows women to urinate standing up, but can also be used as a bidet and a masturbation toy. It is both a pleasurable object and a political tool to subvert daily and private life. It is feminist art catering to female audiences.
Malignas Influencias is a feminist art collective, active since 2004, composed of artists Julia Antivilo, Jessica Torres, Zaida González and Paula Moraga. The aim of their visual and performance projects of the collective is the creation of links between history, art and feminist activism. These artists denounce violence against women and claim pleasure as a right.
42 frases contra el aborto
Coordinadora Universitaria de Disidencia Sexual, 2012, 14 min 58 s, artivism video, Spanish, French s.t.
This video was launched on YouTube to promote the abortion debate on social networks. The work reveals the most conservative arguments of abortion opponents, gathered during the Dona por un aborto ilegal campaign, which sought to finance illegal abortions. Such was the video’s success in cyberspace that YouTube and Vimeo had to take down the work because of pressure from pro-life groups.
Coordinadora Universitaria de Disidencia Sexual (CUDS)
CUDS is a Chilean collective of sexual dissidence with more than 10 years of activism to their credit. The members of the collective work with the university community, young people and with Chilean society in general to raise awareness of alternative ways to live sexuality. The practices of CUD navigate between theoretical production and performance.
Julia Antivilo is a historian and feminist performance artist. Her writings examine the cultural and social role of women in Latin America and the relation between art, gender, and feminism. She holds a Masters degree and a Doctorate in Latin American Studies from the University of Chile (Chile), and is working on a Post-Doctorate degree on artivism against heteronormativity in Latin America at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico. She is currently living in Mexico where she collaborates with La Pocha Nostra, Pinto mi Raya and Producciones y Milagros Agrupación Feminista A.C artistic groups.
GIV, with its multi-faceted mandate to distribute, present, and produce independent videos, is one of the rare artist-run centres throughout the world dedicated to the development and promotion of works created by women.