The LASTESIS Collective. Practices for the Feminist Revolt
Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior ticket collection on the Museo Reina Sofía website from 20 October. A maximum of 1 per person. Doors open 30 minutes before the activity.
In November 2019, the Chilean feminist group the LASTESIS collective presented A Rapist in Your Path, a participatory protest performance which sparked a wave of responses, with women around the world taking over squares to condemn patriarchal violence. The impact was such that their voices resonated in every language.
As members of the LASTESIS collective explain:
We feel part of an underground network of women and dissidences that do not answer to national, cultural or idiomatic borders. This power is something beautiful, a true gift. Yet at the same time it shows that the problem is transversal, that sexual violence, and all violence stemming from the patriarchy, is global.
Art is the trench of struggle and resistance we have chosen and do not tire of saying so. We believe in the transformative potential of art and performance, of art from bodies and for male and female bodies, collectivised art, appropriated through common experiences.
This encounter is inspired by the Chilean collective’s work and seeks to offer a space of dialogue with them and with feminist collectives from Madrid to reflect upon the impact of their action, the significance of its upsurge, and its power to bring about new common feminist meaning inside the reverberation of this global wail that follows the wake of the mass strikes and protests of the 8M movement and the struggles for abortion rights.
It also examines the intersection of feminism with the historical period in Chile, the constituent process, and analyses future feminist horizons.
Participants
Feminists in Action is a collective of feminist activists from Madrid which has come into being to propel debates and actions of feminisms in the present.
La Laboratoria. Feminist Research Spaces is a transnational mechanism to support feminist activist research and is present in five cities: Buenos Aires (Argentina), Quito (Ecuador), New York (USA), Mexico City (Mexico) and Madrid (Spain). La Laboratoria advocates activist research inside the feminist tide as a situated theoretical practice enabling position maps and analyses to be constructed collectively.
The LASTESIS collective is an interdisciplinary collective of women from Valparaíso, Chile, which came into being with the aim of taking a stand against the human rights violations of women inside the context of protests in Chile in 2019. It is made up of Lea Cáceres, Paula Cometa, Sibila Sotomayor and Dafne Valdés.