Mujeres Creando

the latent images oh blasphemous altars

Abstract

This study addresses three artistic interventions by the Bolivian social movement Mujeres Creando, installed in biennials and art shows held in La Paz, Quito and Santiago de Chile between the years 2016 and 2018. Called "Altares Blasfemos", these installations consisted of a blunt critique of the State-Catholic Church dyad that sustains patriarchy and historical violence against women in Latin America. Through the caricaturish reproduction of images from the Christian imaginary and the recreation of subversive figures from Catholic iconography, the artists proposed a kind of unbearable image, that is, an artistic expression that intends to be as grotesque as the historical experience it aims to represent. Given the deep theological-colonial structures still ingrained in Latin American mentalities and institutions, such sacrilege obviously generated different types of reaction - from the literal attempt to exprobate and erase the work to different forms of legal-bureaucratic censorship. Based on works by Didi-Huberman, Jacques Rancière, Aline Miklos, among others, the study seeks to raise questions about the particularities of this type of artistic intervention and its reverberations in a project of radical dissensus with the conformations of colonial-capitalist power still in force in Latin America.