For a plebeian practice (of performance?): María Galindo and Mujeres Creando

Abstract

The Bolivian feminist social movement Mujeres Creando, founded in the early 1990s in La Paz, with the anarcho-feminist María Galindo as one of its most publicly visible members, has been maintaining forms of life and aesthetic-political action based on a radical dissent against neoliberal, patriarchal and colonial capitalism, for the last thirty years. They have created and sustained over time various self-managed spaces open to the community, support networks, literacy and self-training classes, a radio station, and other places for meeting, coexistence, discussion and politics practiced from the grassroots, daily life and an attention focused on concrete issues. Its activity is also expressed, from its beginnings, within the urban public space, through grafiteadas on walls and street interventions of different kinds, which use irreverent and embodied aesthetics to politicize with a scandal of plebeian roots and vocation. This paper focuses on the ethopoietic dimension of these manifestations, insofar as they involve a certain aesthetics of existence, by emphasizing the conflictive zones that place them at odds with the approaches from the places of enunciation of academia.