Son[i]a #371. Elvira Espejo Ayca Deleted scenes

Elvira Espejo Ayca is an indigenous artist, weaver, writer, poet and researcher. Her work brings to light collective strategies that resist monoculturalization, moving back and forth between the rural and urban, between ancestral practices and the colonial gaze, between the sentipensamiento (feeling-thinking) of indigenous peoples and the predominance of academic Eurocentrism. In this podcast, we take a deep dive into the  actions of the National Museum of Etnography and Folklore (MUSEF) of La Paz (Bolivia) in search of mutual understanding and respect, while weaving and reweaving the historical gaps and bridges between two worlds.

Aura Cumes charts a lucid historical path through colonial processes, analysing the mechanisms of control, violence, and dispossession that have perversely shaped the identity of the native-servant, relegated in favour of the progress and well-being of white men, their families, and their capital. Racism and sexism thus progress side by side, in a web of exploitation in which hierarchies often overlap.

Raquel Gutiérrez talks about semantic revision and political experimentation, about the failure of “just add women and stir” policies, about popular feminisms and the women's struggle, about what happens when Sumak Qamaña (living well) stops being a path and becomes a model, and about how to introduce the agenda of the autonomy of the body into her notion of 'politics in feminine'.

Teresa Lanceta is an artist, art historian, researcher, and teacher. In this conversation, the sense of touch reclaims space from the gaze. At the same time, we recover the wisdom of weaving in terms of community, as an open source code for those who know and perform it. And through this repetitive, necessary gesture, technique becomes form, and form becomes language. Thus the margins disappear and give way to rhombuses, torn bits, darning, mending... depending on what’s going on at that moment in time.