Luisa Alarcón Criales.
Fundación Red de Mujeres Warmi Yuma.
San Agustin, Colombia.
La fundación Red de Mujeres Warmi Yuma surged as a form of resistance in defense of their human rights during the summer 2021 uprisings in Colombia. Throughout my stay in San Agustin, Huila, I look forward to experiencing and document the labor done by women as they exercise their claims to human rights. I want to focus on what women are actually doing.
As I am looking at human rights from a performance studies perspective my main interests are actions of power and resistance. Drawing from Bourdieu’s (1980) concept of habitus understood as learned normality that becomes natural and gets reinforced, I aim to observe the unspeakable oppressive force enhanced by the Colombian conflict and the situational awareness of the body that comes naturally depending on the space, environment, and/or people in close proximity. The absorption of a habitus is what lays the foundation for acts of percepticide, the concept developed by Diana Taylor (1997) about structural subjugation that imposes self-blindness with extreme acts of violence, to which Colombia has been subjected to for about 59 years.
I am particularly interested in how percepticide is produced and reproduced and in all the minimal body movements that disrupt such habitus named, which become then acts of resistance or choreopolitics as Lepecki (2013) has theorized it, in the everyday life of the women in La Fundación Red de Mujeres Warmi Yuma. As I foresee participation in their human rights watch work by accompanying the victims of gender-based violence on the route for protection that the organization is creating, I am looking forward to the interaction with them in multiple settings that would allow me to look into their acts and lack of choreopolitics in context.
All through this first year, they have created multiple performative pieces such as the staged singing and dancing of the Argentine performance Un Violador en tu Camino [A Rapist in your Way] in the main square of San Agustin; graffiting Virgin Mary as a woman who had a choice at the market; and sculpture making out of broken ceramic pieces as art therapy. I am questioning their use of performance as a form of power, and whether or not it enhances their human rights labor or proposes an alternative way; yet thinking critically about the matter that making visible the issues of human rights violations does not solve them. The eventual goal will be to create a public record of the human rights violations in response to the silence and the lack of data in town around gender-based violence that the organization has encountered in the process of filing claims. I will be leading an ongoing workshop on autoethnography to aid them research gender-based issues and to complete the public record.