The Festival Miradas de Mujeres dyes LABoral pink
Chronicle of the presentation of the III Festival Miradas de Mujeres in Asturias and the activities at LABoral
Image of the exhibition Bidean at Gema Llamazares
By Semíramis González (@semiramis_glez), Semíramis en Babilonia
Last Saturday the Asturian geography was filled up with art, more specifically with art produced by female artists. While this action took place all around the country on the occasion of Festival Miradas de Mujeres, an event created by MAV, the association representing women in visual arts in Asturias was joined by almost all the venues, galleries, associations and centres devoted to art in this region.
LABoral hosted the presentation of the Festival in the region with several proposals: A performance and the projection of a piece of videoart.
Natalia García, director of the Festival in Asturias, with Lucía García, Managing Director of LABoral, gave the green light to start a month loaded with art and women, which precisely that afternoon opened with “Bidean”, the individual show of Miren Pastor at galería Gema Llamazares.
LABoral was undoubtedly the most suitable venue to present the festival. An art centre with a unique architecture and an enviable environment, having contemporary art as its flagship.
The performance Adamantina, which included a dance piece, sound creation and plastic arts was a collective creation by Proyecto Piloto: Rebeca Martin, Mariate García, Patricia Vázquez and Carmen Vázquez. A show about the work of women and sewing, and ambiguous relationship that often times has been a space for freedom and many other times, and even now-a-days, may be a slave-holding system run by big corporations, which perpetuate the feminisation of poverty. The show was complemented with Sonic ambience by Mind Revolution, an artistic duo who works this support with a really high quality.
A view of the performance by Proyecto Piloto and Mind Revolution
Afterwards, Paso de Gigantes by Cristina Ferrández (Alicante, 1974), a two-channel video with material gathered during two years of field work in different locations in Asturias. It alternated the image of a winged figure, a reference to the angel of the History of Benjamin. The main idea of this piece is the decline of the Asturian natural landscape, invaded by great infrastructures that have been built without bearing in mind its immediate environment, destroying it on many occasions. The downfall is another topic we can see here, it is shown through great buildings abandoned halfway through their construction due to lack of funding, and which have fleetingly turned new building works in to ruins.
This relationship with the landscape proposed by Ferrández is interesting. We tend to consider the land where we are born as ours, and when it is damaged, we feel that this destruction affects us. Especially in the case of Cristina, who is interested in the concept of landscape and its relationship with the Human Being, who works here with the Asturian land.
These infrastructures that are ruins rather than useful works have become landmarks in a green landscape, with plenty of wildlife, and who have seen how the entire environment changed due to these constructions.
Image of the projection of Paso de Gigantes
Cristina’s work seems to move away from feminist art, or at least from those proposals by some female artists who intended to claim their duty to be treated equally with artists. This case is a good example to understand that the Festival Miradas de Mujeres is not aimed at showing only feminist art, but rather any art created by woman, claiming, in March, the importance of these artists and their work, celebrating the month of women and sounding the alarm bell in the current art arena.
In other venues around the country the Festival is getting a very good reception. One of the publications that has made a greater effort to show what is happening in the provinces is the digital magazine “M-arte y cultura visual”. It has compiled in its agenda each of the activities of the festival. Finally, we can sketch a map loaded with pink, art made by women and we can be aware of the quality of their works.
Although the rest of the year the inequality is obvious, both in the number of exhibitions and in awards or acquisitions by museums, in March the idea is to avoid this trend and to bring this reality into the open, to make us aware of the need to keep on working.
Besides, in the case of Asturias, we are lucky because almost the whole region has taken part. Even the regional minister for culture, Ana González Rodríguez, has attended the presentation of the Festival at ARCO last February. This shows that our artistic scene, despite the foul weather that we are facing, is committed with equality and the defense of culture.
Let’s take advantage of the activities offered in March, in order to enjoy excellent artistic proposals and assert the role of female artists, not only in Asturias, but all across Spain.
Which activities of the Festival are taking place in your town? Which ones have you attended or plan to attend?
