Presence – presencia

Translation:

Imagine that you are going to a contemporary art exhibition, that the objects you are going to find are not paintings or sculptures, or video installations. Imagine that what you are going to find is what you would find when you visit an aunt’s house: spinach cake, jelly, flowers and embroidery.

Imagine that your aunt sits with you in the living room and suddenly begins to talk to you about contemporary art and shows you her latest creation: an eggshell jelly or a crocheted mask embroidered with ribbons. Imagine that all of this is presented in a showroom. That is what you can find in the work done by a group of women in the Egypt neighborhood. (in Bogota)

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These women are not artists, but during the last two months, they have dedicated themselves to looking with different eyes at what they had done throughout their lives and telling the story of their days from their knowledge.

The manager of the idea was Yohanna Roa, a Colombian visual artist, winner of the Ministry of Culture’s prize for incentives for young creators. With her project, she intended to collect the thoughts of these women, taking into account that those who have this knowledge were produced by older women.

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This is how 14 women between 40 and 80 years old, who went to the workshop with the expectation of doing a course in crafts such as painting a vase, as the artist explains, mounted an art exhibition, where their families and neighbors saw each other. reflected: “I think I made art, I like it”, said Cecilia one of the participants

PRESENCIA was a project carried out in which a group of 13 women who ranged between 45 and 75 years of age participated. It was proposed as a scenario that, from art, made it possible for their voices to be heard, this group of women presented the knowledge that they had stored and processed for several decades. All of them have developed a complex life methodology full of knowledge that we need to recognize, learn, above all we cannot continue to allow this knowledge that takes so much time to build and check to continue to be relegated or left in the background, first of all because of the value it provides. It implies for the improvement of the quality of human life and second because in doing so we are including possibilities that have historically been left aside.

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The story has been written and narrated marking events that are considered outstanding, heroic and visionary characters that allowed or achieved the development of various situations and changes in society. Frequently groups of people and their activities are left aside, without recognizing the importance they had for the historical development and the construction of systems of thought. Much of the activities that have been carried out by women; the way we live life, develop our activities and ways of thinking, are often not highlighted or taken into account. The value of the historical contribution made by women is just being written, we are even just discovering that women have developed methodologies of: work, research, knowledge systems and world views without which the development of historical events in the world would be impossible. humanity; It should be said that only part of the story has been told, we have to annex proposals such as the care economy; developed, transformed and proven by women throughout centuries of history.

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