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PROJECT DESCRIPTION |
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The fundamentals of Wings of the Butterfly
Historically, the feminist and women's movement has undertaken the monumental task of organizing, debating, researching, reconceptualizing and influencing politics and culture towards the recognition of women's oppression and exclusion in Patriarchy today, including gender based discrimination in social movements that engage in transformational politics towards just, inclusive and equal societies.
In such efforts, it has unearthed and rendered visibility to women's contributions throughout history, in science, medicine, history, culture and politics in daily life.
In many cases, alternative paradigms emerge out of women's experiences and contributions. Affirming such paradigm shift is an urgent need, especially considering the overall human and ecological destruction that the present hegemonic paradigm is contributing to create.
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However, many initiatives and contributions made by women remain in isolation for each other, either because women have not had access to these contributions or because many of them still need to be unearthed.
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In the process of rendering visibility and legitimizing women's experiences and contributions, there is an urgent need to recover and affirm the global feminist epistemological slogan which stats that “the personal is political”.
Such a slogan mobilized thousands of women in their daily lives to assume what eventually science (quantum physics, for example) has finally recognized: that all knowledge is subjective, thus we learn form the way in which we organize our experiences and that that is where the source of wisdom lies.
This epistemological breakthrough of the feminist movement mobilized women and legitimized our daily experience as a source of knowledge that oftentimes contradicted what institutionalized knowledge, raised as “universal”. But somewhere along the line in the 90s and the beginning of the new century this feminist approach to learning and knowledge seems to have been lost, leaving women at the mercy of institutionalized knowledge exclusively. Furthermore, institutionalized knowledge has been co-opted by conservative scientific, political and fundamentalist forces that acclaim their perspective as universal.
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In this context, women's contributions are in danger of erosion, not only by neo-liberal policies, but politically and ideologically though the discourse that denies, de-values and de-legitimizes sources of experience and knowledge that do not come from mainstream, experts and science made by men, by affirming the patriarchal Newtonian paradigm of science as “the” paradigm. The reasons why this has happened so fast are many, ranging from past failure of progressive projects to change the status of women and peoples, which opened new room for conservative projects; the rise of fundamentalisms in science, religions and economics that filled the vacuum left by lack of alternatives. |
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Many such factors and more can be mentioned as causes, but the fact is that the de-legitimization of out own sources of knowledge has weakened all women and their movements.
This project “Alas de Mariposa” seeks to contribute to counteract such weakness addressing the political setback by meeting the objectives and activities in it which aim mainly towards the popularization of women's contributions to emerging paradigm shifts; connecting the experiences of women in history to actual day women; developing activist women's artistic expressions, etc. thus, contributing to reactivate women's lost sense of entitlement to NAME the world, tackling this political setback within the framework presented by Aromatic Roy from India in her book: God of Little Things…
“A world run by a handful of greedy bankers and C.E.O.s whom nobody elected can't possibly last… Soviet style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first century market capitalism - American style - will fail for the same reasons. Both are edifices constructed by the human intelligence, undone by human nature… The time has come, the Walrus said. Perhaps things will become worse then better. Perhaps there's a small god up in heaven readying itself for us. Another world is not only possible, she's on her way. Maybe many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”
The breath needed is that of emerging vital paradigm shift that can guide the construction of holistic strategies so that our actions can become transformational. |
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All the spheres in photos above were created by María Suárez Toro
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