Artist, activist and feminist
Lorena Wolffer is a Mexican artist and cultural activist. Throughout her career, she has dedicated herself to the intersection between artistic proposals and forms of feminist activism. Her projects aim to address issues related to the cultural production of gender and erase the boundaries between the so-called “high” and “low” culture. Through her work, Wolffer explores ways to build new narratives that give women and non-normative people a voice and agency.
While collaborating with the virtual summit Healing a Broken World, the artist presented her collective work Almanac of Daily Repair. The project documents the responses of members of the public to the “Pact for the Other Pandemic,” an initiative to commit to the ethical task of eradicating all forms of gender violence and discrimination within society. The pact invites its participants to document small behavioral changes through photos and videos shared on social networks. With this “microactivism”, Wolffer invites people to build collective declaration platforms that obtain their power from a “choral enunciation” that involves many voices.
In this interview, she tells us about her inspiration for the project and the possibilities that art holds to promote cultural and social changes, as to incentivize public policies.
What inspired you to participate in Healing a Broken World?
What I liked the most about Healing a Broken World was the possibility of using art as a tool to address problems that became entrenched or worsened with the arrival of the pandemic. The socio-political circumstances that affected us as women, multiplied during this crisis. Therefore, Healing a Broken World was a call for me to do what I already do. Which is thinking of art as a tool to point out what is happening to us, but also to ask questions that could lead us to possible solutions. I believe that art can reach these problems with a power that does not exist in another discipline or field of action. Art has this enormous power to question and produce other cultural forms.
“One of the principles by which I always like to abide is that we can modify cultural practices with other cultural practices, proposing other ways of relating to each other“
What was the inspiration to create the Pact for the other pandemic?
The pact arose amongst many conversations we had with the entire curatorial team about how to address these types of violences that are taking place in Mexico and the region, and what to do about it. The question we asked ourselves was: what alternatives can we propose that break away from traditional political systems? Can we think of modifying in small but powerful ways the ways in which we reproduce, in a cultural sense, this violence?
We wanted to bring it into the territory of immediate reach. That is, how I relate to my environment, with my family. What are those pacts, those ways that I can condemn outwards but that I witness in my daily environment and which I don’t necessarily know how to position myself against. We wanted to consider how we modify these internalized forms. Think about how to bring it to immediate micropolitical actions.
What do you mean micropolitics? How can this micropolitics interact with the great public-policymakers?
By micropolitics, I mean challenging mandates as simple and straightforward as plucking your eyebrows, wearing long hair, keeping quiet while facing an uncomfortable situation, these types of gender mandates. Here the important thing is to know what it means, and decide whether to accept it as such, or not. It is important to understand which gender mandates you are adhering to and why.
“Micropolitics can impact the macro. By modifying certain narratives, we are modifying public policies “
This happens perhaps tangentially, through an action that is not merely political. We do it in a performative sense, by proposing other ways of acting and modifying what later crystallizes into public policies.
What role can artists and cultural institutions play in ending gender-based violence? Do they have a responsibility for getting involved?
There are institutions that have done an incredible job in promoting and producing projects of social practice and incidence in culture, but I think that the mandates about what or how art should be are complicated for me. It’s more useful for me to think about how certain projects can achieve certain things. In this sense, betting on projects or institutions that manage to modify the cultural panorama in true and significant ways.
On the other hand, many cultural spaces support these projects, but sometimes they don’t look at themselves to see the way in which they operate. What happens when a museum exhibits a project on violence against women, but has had infinite cases of violence perpetrated by people who are part of its staff? I think the first thing to do is modify the team before getting involved in projects of this nature, or at least think about doing it parallelly.
How can we balance the enormous impact that art can have in influencing these issues without falling into trivialization?
I think we must be very vigilant of the institutions and projects that are using this as “the hot topic.” I remember when being a feminist was, artistically, but also in the rest of the world, wrong 10 years ago. 10 years ago, saying “I am a feminist” was equivalent to constant questioning. And suddenly, with having managed to enter and transform certain spaces, the wave of everything else has come, of trivialization, of pink washing, of the use and abuse of feminist postulates only when they are useful.
I believe it’s partly up to us, those of us who have always worked on these issues and also the younger generations, to do this work from a committed and honest posture and pay attention to what the proposals and postulates are.
Even though we have reached places we had not reached before, and accomplished a lot, we must be careful around how our fight is being used, and when it is being used for purposes that are not our own.
Leave a Reply