MEMORY AND DECOLONIAL PRACTICES THOUGH MAKING: A RECLAMATION OF MESTIZA IDENTITY

We have arrived at a particular moment in the history of the world where Indigenous voices, knowledges, and ways of thinking and making are beginning to be included in the conversations on value and aesthetics within the academy, the gallery space, and within art and design Institutions. With my thesis project, I am striving to put forward a decolonized and anti-capitalist approach to design and art research to have a conversation across history, one that brings forward the genealogy of traditional Indigenous art forms while also transforming them through material and conceptual innovation. At the core of this thesis is a personal exploration of the act of reclamation of my Indigeneity that is not often considered as part of a Mestizo/a identity in Colombia. Questions of gender, aesthetic classification and Indigenous identity are probed through a multi-disciplinary creative practice that resulted in my thesis exhibition. This included a series of masks made in metal (copper, bronze, and the alloy tumbaga ), a copper offering vase, a mixed media embroidery, a video of the making process of one of the masks, and a video performance in one of the sacred sites around the city of Bogotá, Colombia. This work continues a lifelong process for me as a Mestiza artist, where I have fought to reconstruct the pieces of my ancestral lineage in order to understand where I come from and my purpose as an artist and academic in today’s world.