Contemporary woman artists from Chihuahua speaking from the body and the house, México 2011-2020

Abstract

This article analyzes the work done by contemporary female visual artists from Chihuahua, whose work addresses various intimate, public and private, socio-spatial notions in the context of northern Mexico. The main theoretical references taken from the ideas of Virginia Woolf about the ideal territory for each woman who wishes to create art -her own room-, and Bachelard, based on a poetic about the depth of everyday spaces. The observation becomes interdisciplinary since it mixes artistic research with research methods in social sciences.
On the basis of the analysis of their pieces according to the context, reflections emerge related to the social and political aspects that run through the life of the artists from Chihuahua. We realized that there is an approach on issues related to gender, such as the house and the body, obviously crossed by the geopolitical context of Chihuahua, Mexico: arid, conservative and violent as they describe it. For this reason, it is important to focus not only on how they inhabit their creative spaces and how they influence their production but also in the content of their pieces, since they expose the way how multiple types of violence we experience impact us and are normalized. Most of these women create or perform their pieces from their home studios and one way to make them visible is to talk about their work and how the northern context has influenced them.