They explore the feminisms of Mexican women artists in ‘Mobile Coordinates’

Exploring the work of Mexican women artists and their collaboration networks during the seventies and eighties is the proposal of the book Mobile coordinates. Collaboration networks between women in culture and art (1975-1985), under the Fiebre Ediciones publishing label.

In interview with The Daythe editor of the book, Gemma Argüello explained that what they found “is that from both feminisms and art history, they are focused on certain events or groups, mostly made up of men and in the field of militancy also by organizations. , but what interested us was to articulate how the women involved in both sectors had a network, in which they constantly collaborated, and how it was possible to reconstruct that history.

“That was what allowed us to find a large number of artists and managers who had been invisible, many of them linked to feminisms and militancy, others not, but in the end all of them were permeated by the feminist agendas of the time.” , he described.

Natalia de la Rosa, another of the editors of the issue, explained that “this period coincides with the intervention or action of museum directors, curators and editors who allowed this collaboration because they were in charge of some institutions such as Miriam Molina and Sylvia Pandolfi, at the Carrillo Gill Art Museum, Helen Escobedo at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM). They promoted that there began to be a rereading or interest in thinking about contemporary art that was also being defined.

“There was complicity from the institutions, because colleagues and friends who belonged to these groups were working on it, so the interest in changing the discourse of art and the notion of the institution itself was combined; “These agents wanted to change the meaning of the artistic field and thus modify the status of intellectual production,” he stated.

For Argüello, this publication becomes relevant for the younger generations since it is “important to know where they come from, the concerns and agendas that are gathered in this book, they did not arrive overnight, but there is a whole history in which many women have opened spaces for us and have allowed us to reflect and produce from another place. It is thanks to them that we can investigate and collaborate, not only to resist, but to dialogue.”

For his part, De la Rosa considered that, from the field of art history, it is about “redefining the genealogy of the historical process of contemporary art in Mexico because there was already a kind of hegemony of discourse, a story already told of certain collectivities, institutions, agents, but when we scratched we realized that this memory was erased.

Argüelles said that the title of the book comes from “the idea of ​​mapping or tracing coordinates that move with each other, and suddenly we find ourselves in another connotation. Each of us focused on certain practices and themes that we were working on, and we observed that the artists or managers presented themselves at different events. This showed us the mobility of those coordinates and how it is possible to draw a complex network that is not exhausted in this investigation.”

The publication, which is presented for the first time in Mexico City, is divided into four chapters and several complementary articles, “which are not only thematic or monographic approaches, but each essay is intertwined in names, events, actions and pieces, but seen in different ways. The first chapter is feminism in Mexico and militancy in the second wave; chapter 2, literature, editorial experimentation and writing in general, whether in written or narrative formats, but also visual ones. The third chapter is dedicated to institutions and management and how there was complicity between artists and work groups, and the search for intervention by these groups, and the fourth chapter addresses art criticism and theory and the intersections between visual production and theory more linked therefore also to an aspect of the neo-avant-garde and conceptual art,” De la Rosa explained.

Mobile coordinates. Collaboration networks between women in culture and art (1975-1985) will be presented today at 6:30 p.m. at the Chopo University Museum, presented by Roselin Rodríguez Espinosa, Gemma Argüello, Carla Lamoyi, Nina Hoechtl, and Elva Peniche. It is also available in the Utopian bookstores, in the Carrillo Gil Art Museum, in Volcana.