IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 6 ENGLISH | Page 140

In Hablando suave con mi madre, María
Magdalena Campos-Pons explores a vast
subject related to the Diaspora,
expatriation, gender, and race as part of
a series of works titled Historia de los
que no fueron héroes. This multimedia
installation lays out a personal narrative
in order to examine the roads history and
tradition have taken from generation to
generation, and the collective memory
that remains preserved in the evocative,
everyday objects. Meanwhile, Belkis
Ayón induces a certain feminine gaze.
The legend of Sikán caught her
attention, because of the female
character’s victimization. But, she treats
it from a more gendered position,
weighing the connotations and analogies
that could be made. The legend’s own
mystery and its covered meanings in
history open up to certain speculation,
even if it was never her purpose to
reproach the fraternity, but rather the
opposite: respect it and promote it in a
broader cultural sense.
Marta María Pérez has another way of
speaking from her art. She constructs her
identity and unmasks the mythology
regarding gender roles that serve as a
basis for discrimination and crossing the
profane and the sacred. She uses her
body as support for her female voice,
especially in facing the conformity of
“her assigned place” and the lack of
equity in the challenge of “what was
always thus, must continue thus.” The
taboos that persist refer to the negative
symbolic origins of menstruation as
punishment, a product of curiosity and
disobedience: “Your own body’s blood!”
is a sign of shame, punishment, and
repression that completes the association
of impurity and the malign effects that
limit in the context of sacredness. These
aspects
present
themselves
unconsciously and naturally, and have

been popularized within religious
expression.
Yet,
they
lead
to
marginalization and serve as rules of
prohibition. As such, they lead to belief
in the credibility of the religious story
and its trauma, which is invariably
accepted within the cosmic system of
African origin. The story is desacralized
and transgressed by the intimate, private
practices of women. Marta María
Pérez’s
work
conceptually
and
polemically reveals the productionreproduction conflict found throughout
an entire past of myths, evocative
fantasies, archetypes, and transformative
rituals surrounding the ancestral figure
of woman. It casts a doubt on taboos and
clichés that weave popular notions and
beliefs at play in the religious practices
of Regla de Ocha and Palo Monte. In
work, they are extrapolated in dramatic
and aggressive scenes: it is a primitive
and authentic ritualism expressed
through metaphors and allegories to
reveal Africanness as a legacy, through
its expressive forms.

Marta María Pérez, Más fuertes nos
protegen mejor, manipulated
photograph (1995)

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