Curadora/Curator As Healer: Curatorial Practice Through Creative Acts Towards Healing and Transformations

Curating/curator as a form of healing, curando/curandera. Anzaldúa names, la facultad as an inner psychic knowing practiced with daily rituals from indigenous communities or curanderas, like chamanas, artists, and spiritual activists and nepantleras. For curanderas, realities shift. Curanderas are able to travel to other worlds inhabiting spiritual and physical realms that often are “unseen by those whose awareness focuses entirely on the ordinary reality of daily life” (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2015, p. 32). Curanderas, for example, may use material objects, prayers, specific mantras or phrases mingled with anything from nature, to herbs in the process of healing a person and restoring a soul or spirit. The back and forth crossings for a chamana or curandera is the “method of deriving knowledge and power to perform these activities” (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2015, p. 33). Like the back and forth crossings into various transformative acts in the conocimiento process, the chamanería journey is a tearing and re-constructing like a nepantlera. Curanderismo is a spiritual practice carried through cultural lineages through a holistic practice of the mind, body, and soul. According to Aztec ritual practices, for example, Coatlicue and other female deities were often consulted and honored for their “extraordinary generative powers” (Klein, 2008, p. 243). Through Anzaldúa’s theories of conocimiento and autohistoria-teoría, I situate curadora/curator as a healer, emphasizing the curatorial practice through creative acts towards healing and transformations.