Bending the Axis

COMO UN DRAGÓN / LIKE A DRAGON. Female voices from the Global South.

Curated by Meyken Barreto

This exhibition is titled after the song Como un Dragón by Dominican-born writer and singer Rita Indiana. In this theme, Indiana defines herself as a “Dragon” stating her strength, determination, and eagerness to transform patriarchal, binary, and colonial narratives of power. Like the singer, the artists reunited in this exhibition focus on the female experience by challenging stereotypes, hierarchies, gender preconceptions, traumas, dynamics of subordination. They are claiming their spaces of representation as legitimate voices echoing those emerging from the threshold of domesticity, vulnerability, exile, and underestimation. In a way, these are voices stepping out of the south (social stratification) of the Global South. Discussing memory, history, roots, recreating new worldviews and heroines, subverting conventions, or exploring the inner self, the works of these artists display a cartography of resistance versus the dominating maps of power. As researcher Ana Marcela Montanaro states in her book “A Look to decolonial feminism in Latin America”: It is necessary to move the maps from the center to the margins of hegemonic feminisms and rework new places of enunciation…