Goddesses of the Unrepeatable. Art & the Political in Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis

DELFINA CABRERA

Beijing

Congreso; 34th World Congress of Art History (CIHA); 2016

CIHA - Peking University

Since the mid-1970s, numerous Latin American artists and artistic collectives started to experiment with the body and their own bodies as a potent space for poetic and political action. In the context of the many military dictatorships that overtook the region since the 1970?s, their artistic interventions moved away both from the right-wing dominant discourses as well as from the left-wing rhetoric that did not incorporate gender and sexuality issues in their revolutionary agendas. In Brazil, the Movimento Arte Pornô (Porn Art Movement) pioneered the use of porn materials in public performances and innovatively staged ?improper? bodies and sexualities in public spaces. In Chile, the group ?Las yeguas del Apocalipsis? (?The Apocalypse Mares?), transformed a traditional Chilean romantic dance (?la cueca?) into a performance that combined homosexual visibility with AIDS activism. For the first time, clear distinctions between "proper" and "improper" bodies, "normal" and "deviant? subjects or even "male and female? were destabilized in the Latin American artistic field. Moreover, the way they worked with the division between what is considered private and what public (i.e.: the traditional and opposed territories for sexuality and politics) put under new light the aseptic and arbitrary separation of these spheres, while denouncing that sexuality was then domestically confined and normalized. In this sense, the gender disobedience exhibited by both groups disrupted hegemonic circuits of artistic production in Latin American. For this reason, in this paper I propose to examine in detail both artistic performances concentrating on how, at the time, and due to the queer aesthetics they were based on, could not be regarded as Art.