 a radical woman. All right. So we're all connected. And 123 artists have put together the most raw, gorgeous, important, incredible exhibition, one of the greats that we've had at the Sackler Center at the Brooklyn Museum. I want to thank all 123 artists. And I would like to ask Cecilia and Andrea. Andrea, where are you? Cecilia, please, to stand. These are our curators, Cecilia Fahard Hill and Andrea Cuento. Thank you so much. And I want to thank Connie Butler. I don't know if Connie is here. And Ann Philven at the Hammer Museum, where the show opened. And we are now its next and very happy venue. I want to thank the Ford Foundation, because the Ford Foundation was our lead sponsor. And of course, we love our lead sponsors. But also, we have our Brooklyn Museum trustee, Cecilia Picon. And I don't know if she is here, but Cecilia, thank you very much for your support of this exhibition. Starry Night, Goldsmith Foundation, Bank of America. And this one is great. Brooklyn Friends of Radical Women. Everybody, thank you. Yeah, we have to be very grateful to those sponsors. Katherine Morris is our Sackler Senior Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. And Katherine, you are a dream curator. You are my dream curator. You are this museum's dream curator. And you have brought us radical shows year after year after year, since you have been here. You have changed art. And you have changed museums in this borough, in this city, in this state, in this nation, in this world. And I want you to stand up so we can all thank you for being a very, very great curator. Come stand up, Katherine. She is incredibly modest, incredibly brilliant, and incredibly fun to work with. And I suspect a lot of you are here who are here know that that is the case. And of course, we are here standing on the shoulders of our radical Latina women artists from 1960 to 1985. They have persevered. They have been tenacious. They took risks. And to have you here at the Brooklyn Museum is an honor for us. And I hope that you recognize your achievements, even though it was so many decades in the making. As a Native American friend of mine said, great things take a very long time to make. So let us know that you are appreciated and that, indeed, what comes after you is going to come because of what you have done. We look forward to hearing from many of you this afternoon. It's going to be a terrific symposium. I'd like to invite Katherine Morris, whom I have given great accolades to, and Carmen Herrera, whom I adore, who also is part of the deadly duo to join me on stage. And they are going to take it away. So thank you very much for being here. Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you all for being here. Carmen and I are thrilled to be on the stage to welcome you and to start this wonderful afternoon. I'd like to start. We'd like to start. We'd like to begin by acknowledging the land on which the Brooklyn Museum was established in 1823 is the ancestral territory of the Canarsie tribe of the Lenape people. We would also like to acknowledge all of the artists in the room, the curators, and get started really quickly on this. I would just like to say, as Elizabeth pointed out, this show, to this point, has been driven by a remarkable group of women, women artists, women curators, women trustees, women directors and two museums that are led by women board members. It is a group of women that have driven this entire project from its inception and we're particularly proud of that. And I'm Carmen Ermo. Hi, everyone. So excited to be here. So excited for this great afternoon. We had a wonderful experience with Andrea and Cecilia during the installation process. If you've been up to the galleries, you'll know this is a big show, 123 artists, almost 300 artworks. This is a very complex undertaking and it went beautifully and the show looks fantastic. We need to shout out Ali Ricard and Kate Wonderlich for their amazing work in the installation. And the amazing energy, of course, that the artists brought to the opening on Thursday night for our members, friends, artists, family, VIP, everyone. I've never seen the museum so excited, so buzzing, so happy and that's because of you all. And of course today, the excitement continues with this afternoon. We'd love to shout out Margo Cohen, Risa Rucci, Andy Hawkes, Laurenz Alaya, everyone who contributed to this amazing program. But really, it's my pleasure to introduce doctors Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Dr. Andre Juntha. It's been such an honor to work with them. They were incredible in the installation. They know how to party. The book is fantastic. They've orchestrated this amazing scholarly endeavor. Those of you who've seen the show know it's thematically based, so there's so much richness and experience in the artwork, the way they've organized it. But the book itself is going to stand long after the exhibition. It's total feat of scholarship and shows the work, the love, the passion that these two incredible women have put into this incredible exhibition. So without further ado, I welcome Andre and Cecilia to the stage. Well, this is a wonderful day. And the symposiums in this event that happen after the big celebrations are great because they bring together the knowledge, the conversation, the exhibition. This is a great moment of intersection. Well, just a very, very quick introduction of this project. Some of you have heard it before. But this is a project that took nearly eight years to be produced during the first four years. There was a huge opposition to the project. And I know because of that, as a woman, that women, artists, women have a very hard time, and women in general have a hard time still today, even though we were told repeatedly in a very patronizing way that women were in fashion, which was absolutely not true and continues not to be true. But all said, this bad idea became this incredible exhibition that because of the reception we had at the Hammer, and I hope the reception that we'll receive here at the Brooklyn, actually, people are interested in looking at the work of women artists. And for us, this is a chapter of art history and a known chapter of art history which shows how a group of important women, in this case here at the Brooklyn Museum, is 123. Some of them are groups, but contributed to how we understand contemporary art today. And it's very important for us as art historian to do a work where you actually unearth and produce histories that somehow readdressing creates a sort of a sense of justice. For me, it's hugely important to understand and for the future generations that art history can not be written only on one side. Many of these women in their own lives, when they were actually participating, they were part of a very exciting art scene. Some of them were never really recognized, and they had an incredibly hard time, and they still persisted. And still today, for me personally, I've met some of the most amazing women and inspiring women that I would ever meet. Some of them are teaching, some of them are still practicing, but all of them have fiery eyes. They're still angry and they're still powerful. They're still challenging. And I think for me, this resilience of humanity and creativity is incredibly important. So this exhibition for us is an art historical project. It's a curatorial project. It's a human endeavor, and it's wonderful to be able to share this with the Brooklyn Museum. I've said it before. It's telling that it happened at the Harvard Museum where there is a female director who is a feminist, a chief curator who is a feminist, that we have Catherine Morris, we have Elizabeth Sackler, the Elizabeth Sackler Center, we have a human director. So it still takes many, many women to make a women's exhibition such as this happening. But also we need to remember that when half of the population is being oppressed, half of the art system is being oppressed because the average of representation of women, in generally speaking, in the museum is 15%. So in reality, you are oppressing half of the actual production of artists. And this should concern everybody. If you are oppressing the other person that is actually next to you who is part of you, who is your mother, your sister, your friend, your girlfriend, your wife, or whoever you want it to be or your daughter, then it is a problem in society. And also the other thing I wanted to say before passing the word to Andrea is this is an exhibition which is a conversation between Latin America, Latina, and Chicano artists. It's very important to stress this dialogue. For me, there are shared sensibility, there is more shared political histories and experimental history, creative histories, than the rest. So to keep this field separated, to kill this idea that there is a kind of segregation of areas of culture is not like that. This is an exhibition that shows how we share a sensibility and the sensibility is also shared in a wider context with the universal art. So keep in mind that this is not a niche, this is not a niche idea of radical women. This is about contemporary art. This is about a powerful contribution and standing about meaningful art, something that is human and political and brave. Well, I want to say that I learned a lot through these eight years working together. I want to thank Cecilia because we were really working from different, we didn't know even before, I think. And it was, she was planning to do an exhibition. She read an article I wrote. Then she called me, then we began all this crazy project that we are married together for eight years already. We did okay. I really want to say that this exhibition transformed me. I also thought that women had been recognized. I was working very much with theory, with gender studies, you know, problematicizing the ways of conceptualize gender. And it was okay. But when we were planning this exhibition, it was so much resisted by the most cutting edge curators, my friends, my colleagues, telling us that it was not necessary that we may have all been already recognized and why we are not introducing men. Then I thought, well, why we should introduce men? You know, if you are making an exhibition of German art, nobody will ask you why you are not introducing a French. Then I thought, well, this is completely ridiculous. But I was aware that it was something traumatic there. And then when it's something traumatic, when something is so resisted, it's because it needs to be down. And then this makes us to be more sure and not to have doubts about the exhibition. Works were amazing. We were convinced that it was a necessary exhibition and it was a political action, also an aesthetic action and that it was very necessary. It transformed me because I was this kind of people, you know, I say with respect that think, well, I am a woman that I never feel myself oppressed, but we should not generalize our own feelings. We should be able to observe the society and to understand that maybe we are being patriarchal also in the way we talk, in the way we use our concepts. Then this exhibition, Transform Me, make me be part of the important feminist movement in Argentina and to be aware of how important is to work together, to work for what is making us to be together and not for what make us to be different. Then I think that this exhibition as two artists said to Cecilia and me, Liliana Porter and Anna Tiscornia is like a forum and as a chorus. It means you can listen all the voices and they have something to say. It's a forum, it's a place for expression and I am very happy that we were able to create together with the artists, together with all the staff, friends and colleagues, women that we are working at the Hammer and at the Brooklyn Museum. As we said, it's an army of women making this exhibition possible that this is happening. Many of these artists were completely erased, not just in the states, institutions, in American institutions, but also in their own country. It was very difficult for us to arrive to the different countries to make research and to find colleagues that were telling us, no they are not more important artists, no they are not and then we have to do research and to go into the archives. Then recover these voices and to bring here to the space of exhibition. Then I am incredible happy that we were able to do it. Yeah, and just to finish. This was... Okay, so yeah, so now we are calling to the stage Josely Carvalho who is one of the radical women in the exhibition. We have a special commemoration happening now and it begins with Josely's and then it will continue with all of us. We, all radical women, are doing an action in remembrance and protest of thousands of women murder because of their political activism and involvement with social justice. I would like to start it with Marielle Franco, a Brazilian politician, sociologist, feminist, human rights activist, exterminated, was not only killed on March 14th, 2018. And nobody has found yet the killers as we spoke a little about paramilitary but they would never appear and I doubt who you will ever know and I think this is a very important action because this is interferes with the whole political process in Brazil. Hi everyone and welcome. I want to thank you all for making it here today. My name is Justin Doniz and I'm a museum apprentice here at the Brooklyn Museum. Being an artist born and raised in Brooklyn, it's such an amazing opportunity to be introducing such an inspirational and powerful Latin American artist. Our first panel artist Cecilia Bucunha was born in Santiago, Chile and raised to a family of artists and writers. Eventually majoring in fine arts at the University of Chile, she has explored many different forms of art creation including but not limited to abstract, poetry and the precarious. She has displayed that with grit and imagination, expression and achievement can be accomplished in any form. In turn, dreams will become a reality. To me she's such an inspiration in showing there's no requirements to create art whether you're a materialist, paint, debris or a pen, create what you love. Let's hear it for Cecilia Bucunha who'll be in conversation with Catherine Morris, a Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art here at the Brooklyn Museum. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome. Gracias. Whenever I see Cecilia I just wanna look at her and smile. It's a pleasure to have this opportunity to speak with you today. And since we're the first speakers announced sort of leading off the day, I thought we could start with two important terms relating to this exhibition. One of which appears in the title of the show, the other does not. One word is radical and the other word is feminism. And I would love to hear your thoughts about how both of those terms apply to you personally but also in relationship to your work. Okay. Since we have just come from a sea of death, acknowledging the continuous murder of the women, and I would like to speak of another form of death that patriarchal culture has created around the world for the last 5,000 years really at least, which is the killing of language and the reduction of language to sort of a minimal expression. The word radical of course hides root. And so every human being is rooted to the mystery of life itself. And so to be radical really means to remember the root. The root in the inextricable union between life and death. So that is what my work is about. It's about a complete awareness of death, which means a complete awareness of life. And fem, fem. You probably know that root fem means really dead. And if you think of it that way, you begin to see the incredible beauty in that root. Yet in the world that we live in, it means a put down. To be feminine is to be ridiculous. To be feminist, it means to be inconvenient and inappropriate. Everything negative and destructive is associated to that dead. Think of what that implies. Why is this fear and hatred of the fluids? When you look at the exhibition upstairs, you see a lot of fluid. It's everywhere, it's pouring down. Practically every art is pouring inside of us, and moving inside of us, and I think that's the energy that brings thousands of people in because of the denial of the life force. The dead, the milk is really associated to the milky way. The milk has been flowing for millions of years in all mammals, and hopefully it will continue to flow. And the other unmentionable fluid, which is just as powerful, is the menstrual blood. So I have just published a book in Berlin which I published with the documenta, which tells the story of how this little red thread has run my life, and how it has become kippus, how it has become really the notion that this menstruation relates the human body, especially the body of the woman, to the cosmos, to the cycle of the life of the planets and the stars and the cycles of the moon. So to the spice menstruation is to the spice or cosmic dimension. And the cosmic dimension really means the scale of the imagination, the unbound imagination of humans. Oh, it's very hard to follow up on this. Tell me when you became a feminist. The first time I was a little girl, maybe not so little, but still little. In the 60s, I think that's when I first saw this image, oh, women are burning brass, and they are called themselves feminists. Fuck! That is absolutely fantastic. So I became instantaneously a feminist, because up to that moment, for example, I experienced the same that every woman that is in this room experienced. I know, for example, I remember when I was born. When I was born, my mother cried because she had not produced. I know the nurses that received me on that very cold day in Santiago de Chile. Oh, a girl! You know, so that girl, oh, that followed me throughout my life. So the burning of the brass really meant the end of that and the complete liberation of who you really are. Cecilia, those nurses had no idea. We have some of your work on the screen here, and just even your introduction talking about women and fluids and thinking about your work in terms of scale, you have moved throughout your career between picking up small pieces of flotsam and jetsam and making imaginary objects that are not meant to survive. And you've also dealt with the incredible scale of imagination, which you have referred to as encompassing the cosmos. So could you tell us a little bit about how you move back and forth between these two extraordinary kinds of proportional propositions? Yes, I think this relates completely to the indigenous understanding of being in a multi-dimensional state. In other words, the understanding that awareness is shared by every living thing. My art began in Concon, which is pictured there on that place, and Concon means water, water, or it means consciousness, consciousness, or it means the sweet water and the salty water. It really means the cycle of life and death. Concon is the name of one of the most ancient deities of the Andes, even though nobody now living in Concon knows this, because all this information, all this knowledge of indigenous peoples has been suppressed. But because I am half an Indian, I'm a mestizo, somehow this knowledge was available to me from the land itself. So one day I am in Concon, I am a teenager, and suddenly I became aware of the awareness around me. So the scale of the totality of that awareness was boundless, as I was saying, because the sea was aware, the wind, the light, everything was aware. And I, this tiny thing smaller than a grain of sand, was also aware. So the magnitude, infinite scale, and the tiny scale were one for an instant. And that is what allowed me to do little pieces of almost invisible works that high tide would erase and also monumental works that can take up half a city or half a town or a big museum. So for me, the possibility is just there and a scale is for us to play with. So the other way that I imagine scale and multiple voices and a kind of embrace of thinking about the cosmic level of so many of your approaches to your work also includes words. Your work is included upstairs in the section of the exhibition, The Power of Words, and obviously your work in poetry and your enormous study of the kipu and other subjects. I wonder if you could talk about how you see words functioning in relationship to the visual art that you also make. Right. That is really one of the weirdest things in the world because how did sound become sound and silence? How did they become an alphabet or a kipu? It's really impossible for us to even put ourselves in the place of the first peoples who imagined that and how it would make sense to millions and millions of people when in reality the way I think of it is when you speak a word it is as if the sound was allowing you to see an image. So something that is already embedded in our brains makes that crossing of perceptual fields that at the same time that can be united you are completely aware that they are different. So it's the ability to be in that double space that makes us human and that's why a computer will never be able to match us and the idea that artificial intelligence would somehow supersede us as the power could like us to believe is 100% bullshit because when is artificial intelligence going to be able to be simultaneously in so many states of consciousness? I love being on the stage with this woman. So let's talk politics. Let's talk about a very specific event that relates to liquid and milk that you've just talked about in a sort of metaphysical sense but this piece is involved in a very specific political action as well and I wonder if you could tell us a little about that. Yeah, the brutality with which we are treating the planet and each other seems to be increasing all the time but in the 70s that was the first at least for my generation that was the first encounter with unbound brutality as it happened in the military queen Chile on September 11, 1973. I was in exile in Bogota in the 70s at the time and I adore Bogota. I arrived there to be there for maybe a month or so and I ended up staying for almost five years but the enchantment of Bogota was that the people had never yet been to be submissive and when the milk crime which was happening whereby you see because the ruling powers in Latin America are in adoration of profit, everything goes. Everything, every form of corruption, every form of killing, everything is fine as long as there is gain. Of course this is what people have been trained to believe and so these people were buying milk, adding paint and powders and then sealing again the bags of milk and sealing them as milk so almost 2000 kids had died and nobody was taking action about that milk crime and the papers were full of articles about the milk crime written by the Hermanos Caicedo who I honor by naming them because otherwise I would never have known so I got an invitation from the Cada group in Chile to join them in their first action when they founded themselves with the invention of a name and they say Cecilia was going to do a work called Para no morir de hambre en el arte not to die of hunger in art and we are going to be distributing milk and they knew nothing about what was happening in Bogotá so I answered immediately and said yes, okay I'm going to do something so I filled up the city of Bogotá with these posters that were done by the people who announced the Plaza de Toros how do you call that, the bullfights and so I announced I would be spilling a glass of milk under the blue sky those who know Bogotá know that at the time Bogotá was always cloudy and so nevertheless the sun read the posters and came out and so the sun came out and 12 people came to the appointed place in front of the Quinta de Bolívar and all I did was as it looks there I spilled a glass of milk which of course was not milk with a red thread that's right and I wrote a poem that is not here but I believe is in the world and the poem says if I can remember it something like what are we doing with life and the question is embedded in the red thread because you see again the fluids the milk and the blood are always in dialogue Maybe you could describe what the kipu is in the history of that for the audience members who perhaps don't know Ok, kipu means not in Quechua and the Andean people devised more than 5000 years ago a system of communication which consisted not of an alphabet but of tying knots and knotting them and these knots were so complex that they had as many iterations and transfigurations possible as the alphabet that is to say they could transmit very complex information not just numbers, statistics but also narratives and so I came across the concept of the kipu when I was a teenager and I immediately conceived of the fact that kipu had been destroyed, disappeared persecuted by the church and had been banned and the people who knew how to read and write the kipu all murdered so my first kipu was just a mind idea it was called el kipu que no recuerda nada the kipu that remembers nothing that was in the 60s and so soon enough a few years after that I think it was after the military coup that the notion of this erased knowledge that had been extracted from us as you extract you remember that novel that was called the Extraction of the Stone of Madness by of course a woman and so we had been deprived of the knowledge of the kipu and to speaking kipus as a way of declaring my desire for memory a memory that was not there so it's this desire to remember what in actuality you have to invent as you go so my kipus are really inventions and transformations the connection for me of that knot on that glass and pulling the milk over feels very connected to the ideas that you talk about in relationship to sharing, history, shared experience so one of the things that I'd like to mention is that as a curator who often works in art of the 60s and 70s I'm very interested in conceptual art that's where I've done a lot of my curatorial practice one thing that happens a lot when I call an artist and say I'd love to talk to you about this piece you made in 1978 the response I often get is do you want to see what I'm doing now? do you want to come to my studio? and it's a very important point that in relationship to this exhibition in particular when we're talking about a history that has been excised or a history that has not been addressed or a history that perhaps has been deliberately kept quiet it was important for me in thinking about this exhibition coming to the Brooklyn Museum to acknowledge that many most of the artists in this exhibition are still active practitioners of their work are still actively part of making important comments and work engaged in the art world today and thinking about how we might in some small way make that point Cecilia and I have and along with the MFA Boston have been working on a project so that next month we will be installing one of Cecilia's large scale Kipu works in our first floor so again that was an idea that really grew from wanting to support the contemporary practices of all of the artists in this show in a sort of gesture that would allow for that so this takes us back then perhaps to obviously the scale of the Kipu and the question we had and as I mentioned one of the things that you talk about is the scale of the imagination particularly in the Kipu of the Andean imagination you said so maybe could you tell us a little bit about that? Yes, one of the little known factors I mean everything about the Kipu is really unknown but the most unknown factor is that the Kipu is not just a tactile object the Kipu also had a virtual dimension during Inka times they had the concept called Seke which means straight line and so they had an imaginary Kipu that spread out in 41 directions from Cusco, Cusco's the core the obelisk of the entire universe I don't like to call it empire because that's a western term but the Inka universe had an umbilicus and how do you call it? a belly button a belly button it's hard to say belly button this was Cusco and it spread in every direction all the way into the galaxies which are regarded as the source of life and the source of water all the way into the top of the mountains from where the water comes that will allow people to exist and it involves a sort of reading an organization of all the racial practical, economical, social activities of the communities in regards to the care of the land and the responsibility for the care of the fluidity of the waters among other things so when I understood that the Inkas thought of themselves like all of them were one Kipu and somehow that translated in my work to the performance racial activity of the Kipu where I have been with people for three decades perhaps or more with that concept because indigenous why are the indigenous being persecuted all over the world now massacred in the most beautiful way from the perspective of the killers and the most horrendous way from the perspective of the people murdered is because they have an ability that they see themselves as individuals and see themselves as one and that is a really powerful political dimension and so my Kipu here in Brooklyn Museum is going to be called El Kipu Desaparecido The Disappeared Kipu will refer exactly to that concept and it will have the two dimensions of a textile object and a racial performance to remind our bodies and our connectivity to come alive for political action And so the title links us back to the earlier period this direct conversation with the political reality of The Disappeared across so many countries Could you maybe tell us a little bit about I want to sort of go back to the notion of radicality and in the way that it operates in this exhibition Can you tell us maybe if you have thoughts about the way that this exhibition functions for the artists in the show in the history of art because there hasn't been an exhibition like this before Do you feel that it's presence now Could you tell us a little bit about the impact that's had or your thoughts about how it sort of plays out in the larger art world which you're obviously also a part of Yes I completely share the words that Cecilia Pajardo and Andrea Junta expressed that each one of us has been erased wildly brutally for 50 years I have been doing what I do for 50 years and last year when I was in documenta doing a kipu a lot of people in Chile Who is this Cecilia Licuña? Who's ever heard of this Cecilia? It was like a sort of something outrageous that I would be there instead of the big stars of the Chilean arts and I am sure that most of the women in this show have had very similar experiences So the radical thing is to see yourself in your own way to see and liberate who you really are and so that radical gesture when it's done collectively as it's been done here becomes extremely powerful and people feel it it's like an animal thing I remember when you opened in Los Angeles there was a line of people going around on the block probably I don't know for how many coils like a serpent of people who still wanted to get in and couldn't get in because there were so many people What are these people attracted to? Is the revelation is to the fluids is what? It's the fact that this suppressed being and this suppressed knowledge, fun, sex eroticism when it works it's very hard not to see them all so I invite you to come many times so that you can slowly discover so many hidden things in the show even though they are there to be seen and one of them is this work is a performance that I did I believe it was 1970 where it was the early period when fruits were being sold in a little net and so I grabbed one of those they don't exist anymore they were made of thread and so they were very elastic so I put one of those threads in my head and I told my boyfriend then we're going to play a game where I am going to be a fruit and you're going to eat me he liked that game no, I said we're going to play a game where I am going to become a fruit so you can do as you please with me and so he liked that but then I said then you are going to become my gift and I'm going to do as I please with you he didn't like that but I did it both ways so what you see in the work is the both ways is the reciprocation that you know the monkey society is based on the ethos of the reciprocal action that is to say if you do something you need to receive and give back in terms that are equal or balanced as mutually accepted so that principle is beyond the quality is about involving the mutual perception and the sort of acknowledgement of the other's desire and I thought when Cecilia and Andrea invited me to recreate or do any kind of performance and I did this for Los Angeles I thought of recreating that principle and transform into a collective performance where we both each other and it was absolutely beautiful I think that's a wonderful place to end thank you very much Cecilia here welcome all to the opening of radical women Latin American art 1960 to 1985 my name is Teresa Juarez Moran from the Teen Night Planning Committee and before I go on I would like to tell you all a little about myself I am the middle child of Mexican immigrants born here in Brooklyn, New York I'm studying digital illustration in digital arts and cinema technology high school but enough of that it's an honor to be introducing two wonderful women who are incredibly accomplished and of Latin American descent to you this afternoon Barbara Carrasco a Mexican artist born in El Paso, Texas who has been deeply devoted regarding her role in Chicano civil rights recently been able to showcase a mural of hers named LA History, a Mexican perspective that depicts the reality for the lives of people of color and their struggle something that Ms. Carrasco felt the history textbooks avoided revealing unfortunately it was a heavily censored piece dealing with a lot of controversy at the time but now it is showcased in the Natural History Museum viewed by more than thousands Ms. Carrasco our second guest is Janet Torro a visual artist who was previously focused on painting while at the University of Chile the country she was born however, this changed once her uncle disappeared during the dictatorship of Pinochet prompting her to change from painting to performance using her own body as the canvas nowadays her artwork is displayed in different areas for all to see one of these performances is El Cuerpo de la Memoria where she depicts social reality when words just don't feel like enough a round of applause for Ms. Carrasco and Ms. Torro in conversation with Cecilia Fajardo Hill co-curator of Radical Women Latin American Art 1960 to 1985 this is the second session it was a wonderful beginning with Cecilia whenever I see the exhibition I'll talk to the public about this I always tell them that the exhibition contains 123 radical ideas about art we just heard about one we're going to hear about two more there's so many more views one of the exciting things for me to actually share this small conversation is to bring together a Chicana and a Chilean artist because for me it's incredibly important that the exhibition is brings alive this conversation this kind of America's global South perspective on what sort of struggles and experiments and art was produced in our continent not just think of Latin America or so forth so the introduction to the artist was amazing but I just wanted to stress about Barack Carrasco is a Chicana artist born in El Paso and what is incredibly powerful for me about her practice is the fact that she was involved in a very powerful way with the United Farm Workers of America was a very close person to Cesar Chavez who is powerful and absolutely crucial figure of the history of America and the rights of the Chicana Latino people so she's all her work has been always informed by political vision and also by trying to reveal censorship, oppression and also highlight the wonderful ways of people that have been erased because of who they are such as she will be talking about some of the work and in the case of Janet Toro Janet Toro is one of the youngest artists in the exhibition and it's wonderful because actually we found her from Guatemala that shares again another really brutal history of violence who is a lot younger several generations younger than Janet and again it's interesting that Janet started as a painter and then moved powerfully into working with the body and it makes a lot of sense because a lot of her work has to do with this kind of ongoing history and especially particularly the history of dictatorship that touched her very deeply in a very personal way since very early on she moved to Germany in 1999 and she continued to produce her work also in relation to the violence and experiences that she had actually had in Chile and returned to Chile in 2014 as has actually reconnected to her practice in Chile something challenging especially because as we know so many of these artists have been sort of erased and not being part of the art scene even probably she would have been in Chile so this is a struggle that so many of the women share so we're going to begin with Barbara the things we're going to do now is we're going to each one of them are going to talk a little bit about sort of crucial works in their career and then we're going to establish some conversations towards the end but for me it's important that you actually see them a little bit broader from the pieces that are simply in the exhibition Janet doesn't speak English so we're going to do consecutive translation I just want to say I'm incredibly honored to be in this exhibit with all these wonderful artists from so many places and I just feel I'm so grateful to Cecilia and to where is she Andrea because it just was an enormous amount of work and I just feel very privileged to be in it so I'll start off like when I first started the word Chicano is not I have to say this first the word Chicano is a negative term to our parents it's sort of like they think it's a negation of our Mexicanness that's what one of my aunts said to me but it's actually a political term it was an affirmation of our Mexicanness actually but also it was a word of empowerment because we belong to a movement a Chicano movement which was spearheaded by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers but also the walkouts that preceded me I was 12 years old when the walkouts were happening in the schools LA schools in LA but I became involved on the campus of UCLA I met Cesar Chavez in 1976 and I heard him speak and I was just so I went to Catholic school for nine years I have to say that I heard the Catholic in him you know dedicating his entire life to improving the lives of the most exploited workers in America which are farm workers so when I was a student at UCLA I was also very conscious of the fact that there was not a single female editor of the Chicano newspaper on campus until I became the first one so so I did this piece it's a lithograph it's in the exhibit which I'm very happy to say I did it if you could read the text wall text right next to the work but my brother said to his wife his pregnant wife that she couldn't go to college that she had to stay home and raise that baby and I said oh my god do we have the same mother because our mom was a professional bowler but she was raised by the champion bowler Mexico so Dolores Rico so anyway but when I did this drawing it was a lithograph which is a very complex printing process and I printed it on several different types of paper rice paper this one in the exhibit is on rice paper but I did fluorescent pink for my brother so and then I did this also while I was a student both these pieces were done while I was in my last year at UCLA 1978 and then after I graduated from there I became involved with the public art center which was a collective of Chicano artists really great artists actually the late Carl Samaras and John Valadez and several others and anyway so we started a public art magazine which is Chismarite it was just involving a lot of political commentary by different writers and poets and artists so I was the first female editor of this magazine too and then this is a 16 by 80 foot mural that I painted in 1981 with the help of a lot of artists in the community a lot of young people so that's why I'm really happy to see all the young people here today but back then the city had asked me to eliminate some of the scenes that they felt were negative or reflecting negatively on certain communities and I should have had like this is a close-up it's so huge but one of the scenes was a Japanese internment scene and they had said the Japanese don't want to be reminded of the internment camps and I thought that was funny I said well none of you are Japanese let's go ask them so you know that's what I did I went and got really great letters of support I wish I could I should have brought a copy of one of the letters of support from the Japanese community there were three major organizations the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations wrote one of the most beautiful letters saying that it has to be in the mural because it's a constant reminder that this should never be repeated and we're kind of in danger right now something like that happening so and then my mural since it was censored I did this piece that's also an exhibition about censorship and so that's supposed to be me right there paying with the spirit of cicatos in the background and because I felt like the Mexican murals were very instrumental and inspiring a lot of us at UCLA we never heard about those painters of course it was Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci and all that but I had to go and seek those artists out in the Chicano State's library on campus and this I started doing portraits of really strong women like Dolores Huerta who I consider a very strong feminist Dolores I don't know if anybody has seen the documentary on Dolores but it talks about her entire life and I'm in the documentary briefly but I'm the only one that uses profanity in the movie because she disclosed that she was in a national magazine called Us Magazine I don't know if they still have that magazine but it was National Magazine and she was interviewed and said and talked about the sexism and the union and these are to say Cesar Chavez didn't like that very much but when she called me up and told me I said oh my god shit's gonna hit the fan so that's in the film you know I just a three hour interview and they select that you know so then this is Cal Primas this is my daughter and her cousin and I just started really focusing on young people because of my daughter she's now 23 but she has a different way of expressing herself as a young feminist she has gone on so many marches with me and so she knows Dolores really well she comes into LA and she says does she have to stay in my room again and it's really funny now she realizes how important Dolores is to all of us but at the time she didn't so this is my really good friend Isabel Castro who's in the exhibition too she also through her photography has documented women in the community and she's very much a feminist and it's been a real supporter of my work and vice versa we are very supportive of one another we came to Brooklyn together and so I just wanted to show you her work I think she's really great and this is from a series Women Under Fire which is in the accident so thank you thank you Barbara I love that Barbara includes Isabel Castro here is a kind of great sign of solidarity because Isabel Castro the works that are in the show that she showed are about making visible the issue that the Chicana Latina women would be in sterilize without the consent is a huge tragedy that happened during the 1970s in the US so now we're going to move on to Janet Toro is also going to talk about some of her works I'm going to be kind of do a consecutive translation we're going to move as fast as possible but is it important that we understand a little bit what her work has been about this is a piece that she is going to talk about which is about the Rio Mapocho which crosses the city of Santiago the Chile which is the capital of Chile from the east to the west she does a parallel between the territory and her own body and blood and the river and she's talking about the blood that has been spilled through the violence of state this is a very large series of 90 installations and performances done in the museum in the Bienal de Arte Joven of Young Art of the Museo de Bellas Artes in Santiago so this is the result of a very intense research that she did where she analyzes as she integrates 62 methods of torture that she found out that we used during the time of the dictator ship in Chile so it's a very hard process but it's very difficult to understand what the research is in Chile. Lamentablemente son métodos que se siguen usando hoy en todo el mundo, también aquí. Regrafully these methods of torture that are still being used everywhere in the world, even in the states, some of them. Y lo que hago con mínimos elementos, con harina, con alambres, con tiza, llegar a extremos, como en este caso la performa en 17. So what she does is with minimal elements like such as flour, string, alambres, tiza, wire, and chalk and then slowly to kind of create the kind of extreme situations of violence. So with this performance she actually covers her face with flour, every single orifice of her face and her body to the point where she nearly as fixates herself, taking the body really to the limit. This is a performance number 19, so there are all many performances in between. So what she did is she actually did this experience where she takes her shoes off and she works from the museum, moving by all these places where torture was taking place and then walked back to the museum. This is performance number 57. The illusion is to rape, there she opens her legs and shows her sex to the public, and then she covers it with flour and one of the gauzes that she's actually using in the performance. Then as the big jump is that she actually emigrated to Germany. She does several works. She does this in actually in her own home. The theme is the relationship between the public and the private, because any person could actually enter this space. Isolation is the name of the work and she wraps every single object that belongs to her with layers and layers of plastic until the point where the object loses its function. She lived within this installation during two months. Each time that she needed to use one of the objects she needed to unwrap it and then wrap it again when she stopped using it. She's dealing here with the issue of plastic. We consume how many billions? One billion of the weight of tons of plastic a year. Several series of seven performances in installations. In this case it's Karmine, she deals with the issue of the human trafficking, which is a form of violence, 80% of the people suffering from this type of modern slavery are girls and women. 80% of people that suffer human trafficking and slavery are girls and women. She paints her lips, she passes a thousand papers over her mouth, it lasted seven hours without stopping. This is a piece where she draws the lines of the horizon. The line of horizon related to the refugees, of the refugees, yes, comes. It lasts 24 hours in an uninterrupted manner and there's more than 44,000 drawings. This is Asougi, which, I don't know exactly how to translate this word, is like a beat or something like that. Asougi. Well, where she introduces inside the Havagiana, one page of the newspaper Mercurio. The newspaper Mercurio is an emblematic element of the power of the factics. The newspaper stands for an example of the supposed factual recordings. This is an inverted uterus and instead of giving birth, it actually brings the shadow into things. This performance she did last year. She does this horizontal line on the facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago with a phrase, this is my body, with a sign as the body of form of empowering and also disobedience, in the midst in the context of a society that submits the body and submits the body. So we have a few minutes just to establish some sort of bridge between these two practices, for me what is actually powerful and we have two very strong forms of activists, forms of political art. So if I think of Barbara kind of marching and painting banners for the civil right movement, the Chicano movement and I think of Janette putting her body outside and still today talking about these wounds that have not been healed and these are all stories that have not been resolved. If we think today with the Trump era, sorry we have to put a name to this, we know that this country is incredibly still racist and we have all these things that were fought during the civil rights movement, the Chicano movement, they are still completely back in the forefront, it seems that we have not progressed anything. And one of the things I wanted to bring now is this idea that there is this bridge in this practice but also this sense of this ongoing history of artistic practice. So what I would like to actually ask Barbara is how does she view today in perspective looking back into your first early works in the early 80s and your activist practice and your practice today and your position in front of society. So to think back of this idea of radicality into this moment in time. Well unfortunately I don't think there's been a lot of improvements as far as institutions taking Chicano art seriously. Just recently the Pacific Standard Time Through the Getty initiative had several art exhibits all throughout the city exhibiting Chicano and Latino artists and not a single institution has purchased any Chicano art. So on that level I just feel like we're still marginalized to a certain degree and I think I like the fact that some of the curators like especially there was one exhibit I was in where all there was eight of us censored artists or all our murals were censored. The curators from the national oh it was actually California God I'm losing it California Historical Society they co-founded this co-curator this exhibit and Jessica Howell from that organization said that she was hoping that one day that they would take seriously the work of Chicano artists to the degree that they would actually purchase the work and talk about the work and it's just not happening yet it's just unfortunate you know. And I completely agree I mean for me Chicano Latino artists possibly the most urgent arena of the art system that we have we need to understand we need to give visibility to the issues and to the art practices so we understand a little bit better why the sort of struggles we need to continue fighting why Latinas and Chicanos and Latin American and all the issues we are who we are this is America. So I'm going to move on to Jeanette very quickly so let's go out into Spanish and after this question. idea de cómo, este tu empezaste en ese momento en lo comienzo de los ochentas y cómo ves tu práctica y esta idea de regresar y continuar explorando esta idea de la violencia del pasado en el presente. I'm going to quickly translate what I've actually asked and ask a similar question to Barbara which is this idea, you know she started in the early 80s as a very young person and now she returns to Chile and how, so why does she need to continue exploring this continued idea of history of violence not only in the past but into the present. Primero pienso con pena que la violencia no es del pasado, la violencia sigue presente. Firstly I think with a lot of sorrow that violence is not a matter of the past but is a matter of present. Pienso que ha habido un cambio que es prácticamente visual, pasamos de una violencia corporal al cuerpo. We pass from a violence of the body to a violencia social and economic violence. I think that reality continues to be extreme y uso mi cuerpo para accionar con esa realidad and I use my body to actually activate this reality and make it visible. So one last quick question because I know we are arriving at the end. I would like to ask you because you know you talk about the fact that you know the Chicano artist still not really kind of taken. How was your practice as an artist in your period of time in the 70s and 80s? How will, were you part of an art scene? Were you respected? Did you struggle as an artist in a very patriarchal system at the time? Yeah it was difficult because even when I worked with Cesar Chavez the staff a lot of times they would question my ability to paint huge mural banners. You know there was always that constant like questioning and when my work was shown here at Times Square in 1989 it was a computer generated image about pesticides and farm workers. I was one of 12 artists selected for each month of that year in 1989 so Cesar Chavez was here promoting Great Boycott Week with Mayor Dinkins and all that and I remember I was standing in front of the spectacolor light board and Cesar said he says to me are you sure it's going to really be played here? You would not ask that if I was a man. You know I remember saying that to him because he was surprised and then when he saw the actual animation it was he was very happy you know so it's every as great as he was there was still that kind of sexism underlined sexism and Dolores Huerta that's why I admired her so much because she was able to really work with him closely and trying to change his mind about a lot of things and in the end he really respected her but it's just a constant struggle. I worked in art collectives where the same thing a lot of the artists were really great but they would also do the same thing that might be difficult for you or those kind of comments and or when I was really really young they'd say things like why don't you do smaller works you know why don't you you know it's it's too because it was physically demanding to do the large scale works and but it was just that it was always a and then I was known for being you know I think the LA Times had a photograph of me that said the artist is known for her stormy temper and iron will so I kind of I kind of own it now you know I mean I think I'm good to last one last question to Jeanette very quickly and so Jeanette lo que quisieras hablar un poco de las dificultades que has tenido como artistas de ser aceptada en el medio de tener tomada en serio como ha sido tu recepción en Chile ahora so I'm asking her because I know a little bit about this history what are the difficulties a janet has had to do her work to be received to actually do it physically to have the space and the voice voy a responder muy sinceramente she's going to respond in a very sincere way ha sido muy difícil he sido golpeada she's been very difficult she's even been hit physically beaten she's been sabotaged she's been teased and ridiculed for what she does but nothing will ever stop her she's grateful to André and to myself because she feels that we have removed taking her out of darkness and because in Chile all the curators because of her were actually ignore her work is hard but I'm a warrior okay thank you so much we need to keep up with that thank you Barbara thank you Jeanette great admiration for both of you good afternoon everybody my name is Jorge Bardillo and I am part of the Brooklyn Museum's apprentice program over the summer the museum apprentice will have the amazing privilege to teach summer camp groups from our collection as well as our new wonderful exhibit which we are all here to celebrate today radical woman land American art 1960 to 1985 being a Mexican immigrant myself it is an honor to introduce two amazing Latina artists who are part of this amazing exhibit originally from via Hermosa Mexico Yolanda Andrade would relocate all the way to Rochester New York where she would study photography at the visual studies workshop in 1976 and 1977 when returning to Mexico she started her career as a still photographer for movie companies however during her time in the United States Andrade became more familiar with and influence with the work of street photographers as a result she began documenting everyday life and popular culture on the streets of Mexico City she has won many accolades including a Guggenheim fellowship for creative arts in 2005 and since 1992 Andrade has taught photography at the Escuela de Fotografía Nacho Lopez Centro de la imagen en Mexico City and Instituto Tecnológico Monterey Mexico she's joining conversation today with another incredible artist Catalina Barra Barra is a Chilean collage artist born in Santiago Chile whose career began in Germany where she lived from 1963 to 1972 there she began mixed she began making mixed media works inspired by the artists of the Dada movement her career continued in New York City Argentina and back to her home of Chile her work addresses political issues throughout her career she uses her art and voice to highlight problematic reportings censorship and government terror and focused under the takership of Augusto Vino Chet in the 1970s in the United States she has made works addressing capitalism and military interventionism she's involved in El Museo del Vario and is the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship without further ado please help me in welcoming Yolanda Andrade and Catalina Barra in conversation with Carmen Erma assistant curator Elizabeth Ace Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum hello everyone good afternoon first of all thank you for her for the great introduction it's a great honor for me to be here with Yolanda and Catalina and I'd also like to mention Marcella Guerrero I don't know if she's still in the audience but in my intro there she is my intro earlier I neglected to mention her name so I need to say her name she also put tremendous effort into radical women when she was at the Hammer Museum and now she's at the Whitney here in New York so New York's lucky to have Marcella and thank you for your work on the show and also a special thanks to the audience because I hear it's really nice out but we're getting light from within and from all these brilliant minds so Catalina my first question is for you your artwork in radical women was made at a time when your fellow artists were being tortured and surveilled for their overtly political work in Bunches which we'll see up here as a series that comes from a Mapuche myth and we can read its political overtones today and they're explained in the exhibition how did you make these works with censorship in mind and how did you use images and certain techniques like sewing to protect your political message but also your personal safety I made these artworks at the time when being openly affiliated to a political party was a dangerous thing to do other artists had affiliated with the party being overthrown and where identify as agitators and place under surveillance the intent behind the construction of my artworks was to register in a visual manner what was appearing I sought to represent the torture fear and terror and manifest the political moment that we were living the military dictatorship closed and censured the press and most media outlets were permanently shut down and Mercurio that is the main newspaper in Chile a right wing was allowed to operate and became the main news feed for the military message I elected to use a mercurio as craft material in many artworks that told things biographically the particular sculpture exhibited here in radical women the adro de vida is unsculptured that deals directly with the subject of censorship the press real information and what today would refer to as fake news or display and question by using techniques like sewing like breaking like tearing apart and mending I was intervening the artworks these were actions taking place in the artworks themselves sewing has always been identified as a female activity of no descent so I was using a technique that represented no apparent threat unless you could understand conceptual art this piece here in bunches in bungee gigante that is a pity that there was no space in the museum for this piece that was shown at the Hammond Museum I was told that there was no space unfortunately we had smaller gallery space for this incredible show and this is a piece that was done in 1977 and it's the body of a woman that has been tortured and mutilated and you can see that this is a word that was meaningful then and is meaningful today absolutely thank you Yolanda my next question is for you yes your work in radical women captures the lively life of LGBTQ or queer individuals in Mexico City in this case in black and white documentary photography or street photography why did you use this journalistic style how did your practice changed as you traveled and just tell us about these images I hope you've seen that this is the image that welcomes people off the elevator and okay it's already a selfie spot I went to Rochester to study photography so my first influences were the photographers that work on their the gender of street photography with maybe with a kind of journalistic point of view like a Robert Frank and Lee Friedlanders those were the first photographers that influenced my photography and they are still I think that they still influenced me as well as my teacher who was not in lions that also work in the same way not only it could be journalistic style but it is more a personal point of view that we put into these photographs and where were you showing these photographs at the time excuse me where were you showing the photographs where are they in galleries were you sharing them in books when I came back to Mexico City after attending a school I came back in 1977 there was a starting a big movement in photography in Mexico City so I started to participate in all the activities that were being planted so I started I cannot say I had a difficult time to get into the photography movement at that moment because it was open to everybody but women and men and people of all ages but I think that I have been I have testified how other women who work in painting sculpture in other media they really have a hard time in Mexico but not not photography that's great so you felt that even though in many cases the images show in this case gay march celebration gay lesbian and transgender activists in the streets yes you felt that there was still a chance to get these images seen yeah this particular photographs which are in the exhibition belong to that series but I have also a work in other series like the image of death in Mexico also social and political situations also about women problems and from that personal point of view I was talking about my next question is for both of you today and I know there's a lot of activists in the audience today but we really rely on social media and direct messaging to update us on political activity cabinet appointments police killings and I'm curious in your experiences where you're the cities that you are based in in these challenging political times that you were facing how did you get your news what were sort of the relationships that you were experiencing as as dealing and living in these times and my father were both academics who work in the same university and our circle of friends were intellectuals and makers writers in 1973 when the coup d'etat occur many intellectuals went hiding underground colleagues found political asylum in foreign embassies because of the fear of being associated with the socialist party people accused others in an effort to protect themselves and to gain sympathy with the military control you could only trust those people who you knew closely and the information conveys to those underground channels you could only obtain real news and trustworthy information through the tightly needed community we created and reunited among ourselves with the intellectual purpose of recording and reviewing the events at large and produce work that later could serve a historical documentation of the events in our society the Catalina the people that you're speaking of in this community were they also visual artists or who else were the kind of political minds they were but basically students and artists and other artists yeah so really came from like students and young people as well yeah exactly amazing and Yolanda do you have thoughts about how you sort of experience the the moments that you were you were documenting in your photography yes of course every moment that I have lived in Mexico as a photographer has an echo in my in my work like I could mention I can mention these years of 1994 on that we had many political problems going on in Mexico like one of the candidates to the presidency was killed in Tijuana Baja California so other politicians also were killed and then it came the movement of zapatistas in the south of Mexico in Chiapas so that shows in my photograph too I mean I respond to what's going on around me especially in that time I only work in black and white in Mexico City because in 2003 I started working with digital cameras and I working in color now so some of those teams that I was working in black and white change kind of change because I'm not working so much in Mexico City as I used to to do it in black and white but my work is has expanded to other thematic teams and to other cities as well that actually leads me well to my next question for you Yolanda this is an image of your piece El Grito from 1982 I think from the death series that you just introduced and so I'm curious again in these times where some of the early images were documenting gay and lesbian life the moment of an AIDS crisis of course which was all across the Americas not just in New York as we sort of think about it here and of course consistently in both cases a very patriarchal system was the studio and was your work was it a place of retreat of refuge or were you kind of using it to get your hands dirty and who were the community that you were working with well I think both I work in the streets I I don't have a studio I used to have a lab to work to develop my films and photographs and both photography has always been a refuge for me it has been very important it makes me go on living when I have difficult times in my personal life I go to photography and that helps me to go on to sort of a more individual portraits from your for instance this woman was during the day of the dead and it's the personification of a comic strip called political comic strip a call La Tetona Mendoza which means like a big big big breasted Mendoza so I I like it because behind her there's another another from Mexican comics la borolas which has a very powerful woman who was the the the main person in the family because his husband was kind of a very little man with not much character so borolas represented for many years a powerful woman in Mexican popular culture so I like it to put both of them not only because of that but because the influence I have had in my work from theater and movies and comic strips yes you worked in weren't you also on a film production crew as well you worked in film initially and then I well I didn't work in I was a still photographer in some films that was my first work as a photographer to make my living not my it was not my personal work but just to make my living yeah because these images are so sort of cinematic and they kind of like you're explaining to us it contains so many allegories and narratives but it influenced me what the work I did in the film industry as a still photographer was very important also in the developing of my style of working yes so Catalina I'd like to ask the same question of you in terms of what did your studio practice what role did it play for you in these challenging times of the dictatorship and how how did you and the society friends of movements around you change and adapt under Pinochet and then how did this compare to your life in New York in the 1980s during the month we're seeing the crew a small group of friends and colleagues who were like-minded choose to act as witnesses and created and recorded and actively took a role in the documentation process through the production of my artistic practice and the use of my studio I fulfilled my need to have an active social role and to have a graphical record through the production of my artworks to the dramatic events that were taking place in Chile and society and life in New York in the 80s was culturally socially and intellectually thrilling the city and the actual community were going to a period of transformation where all minority groups were seeking and being incorporated there was social and political freedom and a place and community get to its acceptance and full display it so it was a marvelous period it was the opposite of what was going on in Chile completely that's amazing and and yet you know I think in today's moment a lot of us feel like this show helps push forward the narrative of how you're saying women marginalized people still need to be seen more in museums so it's an ongoing push and so my my next question is a follow-up for you Catalina I know for a period you were also working at the new museum and that you were working with your practice as an artist sharing that expressive potential with other groups underserved communities from Harlem and from the Lower East Side who were coming to the museum how did working with them teach you what did you learn from this experience these communities communities I thought had no access to the world of art or to visit museums or to the education of art history as part of the social context of their reality the communities I thought were uninformed or had knowledge of what making art or being an artist meant upon venturing into and participating with their own art creations in the classroom setting these individuals the students gain confidence about themselves gain understanding of the process of making art and gain connectivity with that art within that art community the community was brought together by the artistic process and broke social barriers and at the beginning with all these students when I talked I tried to talk about art they say they had no respect they didn't want to know anything about that because it was too academic and something too far away from their own experiences but when I started talking to them asking questions about the real life like these pregnant teenagers how did they feel when they knew that they were pregnant they immediately open up and start talking how difficult it was to inform their parents how difficult it was to to realize that they were going to be married etc etc so they started working about those sims where everything that was relevant in their lives they could talk about and then they realized that that were what art meant I mean to be able to give their own experiences and work about that it must have been so amazing for them to learn from you I mean right now at the Brooklyn Museum as we're opening the show really thinking about how are we going to give tours of this massive exhibition how are you going to sort of select who to talk about what stories to draw out and there are so many texts on the wall of course there's the catalog and what's just been so illuminating for me is just how many stories and you're saying that for you that connection for these you know young people who are not necessarily ready for art but those stories and those narratives that draw draw them into the the that expressive potential and so I think radical women and in both of your work ends up sort of being just one of that many voices the forum the chorus that Andrea and Cecilia were talking about earlier so my next question is for you both how did feminism either as an activist movement or as an idea impact your life and impact your art because I may have dropped off so we'll just leave it on when life hasn't been easy at all and working what helped me through my what has given me balance in my life as an artist has been making art that's what really matters so you're saying feminism doesn't matter or is it sort of something that you think about something that is just how you get categorized into certain museum departments yeah I think you just have to keep working making art that's the only possible way and we'll see how it works well I think feminism and the LGBT movement has been important in the development of a photography too and I also can say that I have been a feminist from my early childhood without knowing that there was such a movement like feminism and because I was always a rebel in my home I rebel against the way that my cousins were treated or the way I was treated because I was a girl so I couldn't have the same freedom to go out to because I wanted to do many many things since I was a child so I also got very mad by the way or I saw the women how they were treated so different from from men so I think I've been started to being a feminist since a very early age which I'm knowing it after that of course I just started being part of a movement movement of feminism in Mexico City you know it's so interesting to hear you talk about it coming from your family because I think you know a lot of us who consider ourselves activists it's one thing to sort of call your representative march in the streets but sometimes it's those interpersonal family connections that can be so yes later I started going to demonstrations and being part of the movement yes my last question yes for you both is also sort of related to activism since I think we wanted to bring both of your voices together to talk about art and politics in the context of this exhibition so activists today and always have experienced a really profound impact on their lives sometimes a negative impact where they are experiencing traumas or reliving traumas either that they've experienced or that they're helping other people through we think about this idea today as a burnout and that it's connected today with an idea of self-care of taking a step back and caring for yourselves that you can continue to help others I want to know how did you sustain this radical practice how did you balance these translations of these issues with an attention to your own care yes making art I know these couches make us feel like we're in a living room you know it's like very these couches make it very kind of a relaxed living room no microphones needed yeah yes I have been able to keep the balance just for making art I don't know what happened to you yeah making art makes me go on as I said earlier and now more than ever because in Mexico we're living very difficult times because the violence against women because every day there are many women more than one more than three more than five that are being killed in a very violent way and nobody does anything those deaths just keep being silent nothing happens there's because of the corruption and because if they get the killers they don't do anything to them so that that problem I mean I really overcome trying to overcome those news with my work keep working every day and well that's that's what I do keep working yes and we all thank you for your work and for being included in this amazing exhibition so thanks so much thank