FEMILIA City of Today for Feminine Urbanism: ¡La Lucha Continua!
CANCELED 10.1.2020
Performance art, Conversations & Cunt Quilts arpilleras Exhibition
Socially distanced, masked Opening Wed 10/14 5pm-8pm
@ WhiteBox Harlem 213 East 121st Street New York, NY 10035
October 14 – November 15, 2020 & Weekly virtual event series
A FEMILIA affair at WhiteBox Harlem activates femme identifying Latinx sovereignty and solidarity in their full electoral power during Hispanic Heritage Month through the US election. FEMILIA (City of Today for Feminine Urbanism): ¡La Lucha Continua! show features livestream events, performance art and Cunt Quilt arpillera installations.* Participating model citizens are creators whose cultural practice is central to their resistance work, including but not limited to: community organizers, artists, storytellers, curators, candidates, educators, performers, artists and agitators. Asserting that ¡La Lucha Continua!, the virtual and physical exhibition integrates performances, discussions and rituals as navigational tools for survival. Performing their citizenship as a refuge from appropriation and a refusal to assimilate; participants will engage in a weekly Saturday virtual event series beginning October 14 and ending November 15, 2020. Culminating on an election night Sedition event, FEMILIA imagines interdependent social structures as varied in identity as our nation’s matriarchal Latinx population. ¡La Lucha Continua! show empowers our essential and excluded community to examine the way contemporary US politics intersects with our visionary culture.
Artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer founded the FEMILIA (City of Today for Feminine Urbanism) in 2010 to propose intimate solutions for urban scale problems as a masterplan for survival. Rodriguez Meyer’s intersectional family is part of a growing US Latinx population who represents the largest minority group in the US but are an overlooked and often vilied electorate. Viewers will gather under the arpillera Cunt Quilt (the official flag for the FEMILIA city); on site at Spanish Harlem, and online nationally. Participants will stitch new arpilleras, engage with creative and political leaders while immersing themselves in video installations inspired by indigenous gathering spaces that survived colonization. Cunt Quilt honors the abolitionist and resistance practices of Arpilleras Desaparecidos, Underground Railroad quilts, American Plains adaptive architecture, and the AIDS quilt. The installations recall our ancestor’s interdependence, while signaling the intimacy of daily rituals the artists engage to sustain their activist practice.
A FREE weekly event series supported by the NYC Department of Cultural Aairs, will feature female identifying Latinx artists and political candidates in live stream conversation, demonstrations and performances. The events will be archived as a communal survival strategy for the election and beyond. A Bronx democratic candidate and her abuela will give a Coquito y Charla cocktail and activism demo. Representation & Action addresses the complicated history of Latinx sovereignty in the US and the future of our representation. Engagement & Operation explores the complexities of embedding our community’s narrative into screens, museums, and performance venues. Congregation & Resilience shares solidarity-building exercises with prolic performance artists and educators. Resistance & Sustenance is a conversation between visual artists working at the intersection of community organizing, policy, and academia. In a craft salon, the Stitch n Bitch (Melt) & (Care) arpillera-making demos bring feminist healthcare workers, drag performers, ecofeminists and the audience together to create a protest flag. A Saturday weekly event series will fundraise for progressive Latinx candidates. On election night, an in-person and live-stream Sedition event will begin with performances of citizenship by latinx BIWOC artists and end with a Sound & Vision disco hosted by your favorite queer Latinx DJ.
Cunt Quilt is a protest art collaboration between intersectional feminist activists, progressive organizations and the artist. After the 2016 US election, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer started a National Underwear Audit collecting worn-out women’s underwear to sew into Cunt Quilt arpilleras at quarterly Stitch n Bitch workshops. Panties are donated through the US Postal Service and sewn by feminist quilters, onto stained Queen-sized bed sheets. The quilts are born on protester’s backs to demonstrate an intersectional feminist movement. Abolitionist Stitch n Bitches feature activist leaders in conversation with feminist craftspeople to create protest ags with democratically sourced images that represent a diverse movement. The project is a performance of citizenship in three acts: the Underwear Audit accounts for our bodies, Stitch n Bitch builds solidarity, and the protests hold our governing bodies accountable. Responding to social justice and public health issues, such as LGBTQI+ visibility, climate impact, the wage gap$, racial justice and more; the Cunt Quilt will continue until there is a WOMAN IN THE WHITEHOUSE. Anticipating the end of the project or perhaps a turning point, the exhibition will serve as an archive and GPS for feminine Latinx sovereignty and solidarity building.
Model Citizen demonstrations, discussions and performances include:
Stitch n Bitch (Melt) Sat 10/17 6-8pm Paola Pagan, Ramon Cruz
Resistance & Sustenance Sat 10/24 6-8pm Francheska Alcantara, Joiri Minaya, Juan Sanchez, Alicia Grullon
Coquito y Charla Sat 10/24 5-6pm Amanda Septimo y Abuela
Engagement & Operation Sat 10/31 1-2pm Heather Reyes, Janel Martinez, Maria Elena Ortiz
Election Night Sedition Tue 11/3 8pm – Medianoche Open Call event featuring BIWOC Latinx artists Diversity Unity Harmony and many more.
Congregation & Resilience Sat 11/7 6-730pm Elia Alba, Juana Valdez, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz
Stitch n Bitch (Care) Sat 11/14 6-8pm Karla Croqueta, Bryn Gay
When Beginning October 14 (during Latinx heritage month), the show will highlight the US election night and end November 15, 2020.
What The Cunt Quilt Project is the ocial ag for FIMILIA (City of Today for Feminine Urbanism). ¡La Lucha Continua! show virtually congregates Latinx femme identifying culture creators. for a performance of citizenship
Who Latinx womxn identifying artists and candidates will build intersectional, feminist solidarity by collaborating in a program series. BIWOC Latinx artists will perform an election night Sedition event.
Why Responding to the presidential election, ¡La Lucha Continua! visualizes Latinx womxn in a country whose growing feminization of poverty, violence, and essential labor is disposable; and whose diverse bodies are unrepresented in government. The works examine the barriers for oppressed people to participate in consequential democracy, while providing digital and physical refuge as acts of political refusal.
Where Centered at WhiteBox Harlem (in-situ and live stream) a series of interwoven discussions between local culture producers, political candidates, and latinx performance artists will embody our communal tension between intimate (in-person) and public solidarity practices (online).
How Constructing ancestral sanctuaries called “Architecture Hacha”, the artist will create a framework for the Cunt Quilts and communal engagement inspired by congregational spaces across the Americas such as Hare Paenga, Bohios, Longhouses, Maloca and Cemi. Made from discarded artifacts of our every-day lives such as chanclas and cracked screens, the architecture is a mediator between domestic, consumer life and civic engagement. Cunt Quilts will be stretched onto the structures and performances encased within their screens. The embodiment of multi- generational, entangled materials and participants signals the status of Latinx women identifying Americans and our survival strategies.
Arpilleras Desaparecidos The Arpilleras Desaparecidos quilts were created during Pinochet’s dictatorship where thousands of indigenous Chileans “disappeared”- including press and photographers who attempted to call out the military dictatorship. Mourning mothers, daughters and abuelas who survived the genocide, collaborated in arpillera therapy workshops to create 3D quilts made from their missing loved one’s clothing. Depicting colorful pastures and harmonious urban scenes, the figures upon closer inspection are being tortured and murdered. The subversive arpilleras which were sold at artesania markets and to fund the resistance, and disseminated proof of political violence. The Arpillera tradition appears across Andean cultures including the artist’s Colombian indigenous ancestry. Overlooked by modern art, the Latin American canon and feminist art; this marginalized protest practice continues an arc of creative justice bent by the more widely celebrated underground railroad and the AIDS quilt. Drawing from this social justice craft tradition, Cunt Quilt arpillera mends our indigenous history with abject devotion.
Lambastic 