Maricarmen Gutiérrez Castro

I am a Peruvian performance maker, researcher, and feminist activist. My practice centers the body-territory in the struggle and celebration against patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist violence.

My interest in the body-territory pedagogies comes from a personal need to remember my ancestors’ practices, and the understanding of the centrality of these actions in the collective attempt to embody anticolonial community relations. During my studies in the MA Performing Public Space, I began a practice-based research project where I provoked performative encounters in non-urban public spaces in The Netherlands and Peru between women with immigrations histories. We shared narratives and memories learned through transgenerational community practices involving the body and its reciprocal relations with the territory.

At the Saari Residence, I will collaborate with Peruvian interdisciplinary artist and comrade Jorge Tadeo Baldeón (A.K.A. Koki). I met Koki in 2013 at elgalpon.espacio, an independent, interdisciplinary art space in Lima, where I started practising performance within a diverse community of dissident creators from Peru and other places in Abya Yala.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we both stayed in Berlin, often shocked by the obvious contrasts between the privileged conditions of the European summer and the terrible images of death and health crisis we were getting daily from home. In this context, we made video performances placing our bodies in the city and forests as resistance-healing actions and critical reflections on the place racialized bodies have within the capitalist colonial patriarchal system.

At Saari, we will develop a Temporal Sensitive Research Laboratory (TSRL), framed by our personal approaches to colonial representations of bodily narratives “from the South” present in Western visual cultural products. The Laboratory is a collaborative non-hierarchical space to question and re-think a selection of images, the gaze that produced them and our personal positions/desires and practices towards them. As a “hybrid narrative body”, we will work on a mixed media Collage/archive linking theoretical research, bodily explorations, permanent documentation and collective-sensitive reflections.

Living in daily contact with the forests, the sea and non-human ecosystems around the residence, we will deepen into the possible ways we can use body-territory pedagogies in the re-signification of colonial representations of bodies from the South. The results of these experiments will be materialized as diverse artifacts: audiovisual, plastic and interdisciplinary performances, to be shared with the residence’s community and other collectives.

Maricarmen Gutierrez (Quillabamba, Cusco, Peru – 1988)

Holds a MA in Performing Public Space by Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunsten (Tilburg, Netherlands). Currently studying the MA program Raumstrategien at Weissensee Hochschule (Berlin, Germany).

Co-director of Sonqo Ruro collective (Peru-Germany-Scotland). She has created and co-created feminist performances and performative encounters in public spaces in Peru, Germany and The Netherlands. She develops artistic research articulating body-territory pedagogies with fluid feminist anticolonial conceptual and theoretical frames.