CANTANDO BAJITO: INCANTATIONS AT FORD FOUNDATION GALLERY
The Ford Foundation Gallery presented Catando Bajito: Incantations, the second movement of a year-long exhibition series that celebrates strategies for resistance in the wake of rising violence and incursions against bodily autonomy toward feminized bodies.
Building on Testimonies, the first exhibition in this three-part arc—which centered forms of testimony used to resist violence faced by feminized bodies—the second chapter, Incantations, brings together artists who consider ancestral, contemporary, and future-facing networks of support and care that safeguard feminized bodies through forms of knowledge transmission.
Such networks—symbolic systems, subversive spaces, or covert forms of language—are as varied as the communities that develop them. They include Nüshu, a form of script passed from mother to daughter in China; the use of henna as an agent of protection; and forms of therapeutic communication that have been deemed “gossip.” All have long existed, whether in the shadows or in plain sight. Preserved not in written history but in the body, these channels prepare feminized bodies for potential violence while giving them tools to resist it. This exhibition, curated by Roxana Fabius, Kobe Ko, and Beya Othmani, celebrates these protective channels through artworks by Amina Agueznay, Seba Calfuqueo, IV Chan, Tamar Ettun, Serene Hui, siren eun young jung, Mônica Ventura, and Osías Yanov, which engage with or conjure such feminized spaces for transmitting support.
Incantations is a tribute to the practice of re-existence, a concept coined by feminist activists of the Global South who resist profound acts of violence in their everyday lives. As shown powerfully by the activist contributors to the book Feminicide and Global Accumulation, which explores frontline struggles against patriarchal and capitalist violence in the Global South, re-existence turns spaces of violence into places for building new solidarities, moving beyond resistance to imagine other possible ways of existing.
Considering the forms such transformative possibilities may take, the “incantations” of the title reflect the subversive potential of the occult in fostering re-existence. Defined as the casting of spells through magical words, incantations have been associated with figures whose transgressive social positioning and non-conformity to gender roles have led them to be viewed as menacing. This exhibition considers how such figures and their voices, channeling protective meaning, can embody a practice of generative resistance across generations, brought forth powerfully among these artists’ works.
Cantando Bajito: Incantations. Collective exhibition.
Until August 10th, 2024.
Ford Foundation Gallery. 320 E 43rd Street, New York, United States.
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