By connecting, through art, the stories of the women in history (“Butterfliers”) who remain unheard with the testimonies and knowledge of the women and men who will participate in the activities and actions of Wings of the Butterfly we will be legitimizing women's ways of knowing and linking the knowledge that they are contributing today, with that of women everywhere and at anytime in history.

This process can contribute to break the walls of fundamentalisms in the sciences, politics, epistemology and culture which states that there is only one valid way of knowing and what is known is only true if it is construed with the Newtonian scientific method.

This process might also contribute to articulate strength needed in order to face the challenges of a paradigm shift so urgent in the present context of massive human and ecological destruction that cannot be reverted under the present hegemonic paradigm.

 

INTENCIONALITIES

The 1st Phase will produce a musical theatre show based on the unpublished book:
Women: Metamorphosis of the Butterfly Effect by María Suárez Toro. The book documents women's invisible and undervalued contributions in different disciplines regarding the present dilemmas between the 300 year old Newtonian Paradigm in science and alternative paradigms that have emerge during the past century, out of quantum physics, systems biology and other holistic approaches.

The African, Latin American, Asian, European and United States women from all walks of life that are presented here appear in those debates about paradigms, not because they are building knowledge in the “pure” sciences, but because they KNOW and NAME life's processes in their interconnections, based on their own historical experiences and expectations.

These women affirm that they never let themselves be caught by the three hundred year old mechanicistic paradigm that made of nature and of women “goods” to be dominated.

The Butterfly Effect from Chaos Theory, states that everything is so interconnected and so fragile to the influences of those connections, that the smallest action in any one place can have an immense effect somewhere else.

Afro-american, Rosa Parks reconceptualizes the butterfly effect when she narrates what happened when she refused to give her bus seat to a white man in Southern USA at a time when segregationist laws weighed heavily against the rights of Afro-americans to move freely in their country.

With this action she, together with the civil rights movement, unleashed a wave of nationwide protests that led to the abolishment of those racist laws.

In the book (and the theatre show) she NAMES her own story, thus breaking stereotypes that are still portrayed about her participation in that movement.

The construction of alternative paradigms requires the validation of women's ways of knowing alongside others: feminist epistemology is an inclusive epistemology that validates diversity, thus contributing to the possibilities of breaking away from the hegemonic forms of “knowledge/power” of mechanicistic science and its influence in all disciplines throughout the last 300 years.

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All the spheres in photos above were created by María Suárez Toro