Performing Migrant Memories in Ecuadorian Female Art

Since the 1950s, Ecuador has experienced large migratory movements, and most of the information about migrations is related with economic and social affairs. From an art historical perspective, this proposal aims to explore how two artists, daughters of Ecuadorian women, raised between Ecuador and the US, are questioning the representations of immigrant communities, at the same time, as they do not fit under categories of Ecuadorian art history, they pose the challenge to rewrite art histories, from a Latinx perspective, in order to avoid its exclusion from the historical narrative.

Through performance strategies, Karina Aguilera (1969) and Karen Miranda (1983) find ways to reconstruct versions of Ecuadorian popular culture, confronting essentialist identitarian constructions. In their artworks, I find sensitive connections linked to feminine relationships, and the place of one's own body in relation to spaces of identity.

The works that this proposal studies are The Perilous Journey of María Rosa Palacios and Memories of Development, by Aguilera Skvirsky, and Other Stories and In the mouth of the mountain jaguar everybody is a dancing humming bird, by Miranda Rivadeneira. Through their presence they activate symbolic geographies, in which the representation of the self contemplates a displacement between narrations of childhood, place and location.

Through the notions of Latinx Art History, autobiographical fictions (Klahn and Olivares), feminist geography (Massey) and performative theories of identity (Butler), I aim to locate in the contemporary art discussion how this kind of latina artwork challenges historical, patriarchal and nationalistic discourses about memory, representation and cultural inheritance.