Pørtsik

Julieth Morales                                                                                                                                                                                                              Anexo (2017)

Destejido. Sobre algunos niveles de tensión en la obra de Julieth Morales.

Guillermo Vanegas

That’s her name, in Spanish. She lives in the Cauca, a department which is hyper-sensitive to the most sincere racism, promoted by its politicians and (as always) the ethnic segregation of the territory. She is a woman in an environment which is, perhaps, one centimeter more racist than ours: she knows that accessing political representation will be more difficult for her. Besides, she studied visual arts. These distinctions form four strata that Julieth Morales has approached with an interest to trace, recognise, erase, and exacerbate points of contact between the elitist mestizo culture of Bogotá and Misak culture. From there on, her focus is on understanding the configuration of her identity from a more sophisticated identity than the oafish essentialist formulation of its own ontological regime (“who am I?). In other words, rather than the self-contemplation of her own narcissistic wound, promotes admonishment (“why am I here, why am I required to go there, why is it so difficult for me to leave this place?”)

From there on she has worked twice as hard to recognise the statutes of the original culture of her ancestors, the ways in which they negotiated (or didn’t) with the mestizo political order and the way in which she incorporated these mandates. At the same time, she does not stop pointing out the fact that being born a woman and studying western art in this environment imposes on her a particular way of building herself as an author: from two apparently dissimilar perspectives, she knows both contexts seek to rigidly insure the exercise of her public life. Misak woman or woman artist, rules everywhere. For this same reason her work is not friendly toward the Eurocentric gaze of the mestizo spectator, accustomed to find satisfaction in the representation of people of other cultures through hypocritical manifestations of friendship. Rather than act out the cliché of the murder of the father for a generic audience via a documented performance, she retrospectively questions her education, analysing and deconstructing the principles that have recognised her on a forked road of interpretation: understanding that thanks to them she could reach a type of cultural growth, but also knowing that varied limits were imposed upon her. She also knows that for this reason she can be rejected in each place, and she owns it. She does not play a role of surprise/illumination. This is why she is so good at unraveling.

Opening: Saturday 21th october, 2017

Closing: 22th december, 2017