FREE FEMALE POWER RARA ART RESIDENCY 2022
I spent a month at Rara Residencia in Málaga, working on my projects and, above all, testing some ideas that until then had remained in a more intuitive state.
I arrived with the first 100 masks for Free Female Power already made. The project was conceived and had a clear direction, but I still needed to find a way to turn the masks into a shared experience.
The residency gave me the opportunity to work precisely on that. Talking about the project, explaining it, receiving questions, listening to other perspectives and beginning to experiment with the first exercises helped many of the ideas I had in my head to become more organised and take a more concrete form.
The proposal was to use the masks as a starting point to approach the stories of different women. Each participant received a mask depicting a woman from history, researched who she was, and then shared what they had discovered with the others.
The first exercise took place on 24 April 2022 with a group of creative writing students over the age of 50 from the University of Málaga. It was a first opportunity to see how the masks could activate conversations, memories and new ways of approaching these stories.
The exercises were also carried out with secondary school students. In each class, the participants were given the masks and invited to discover the woman represented on theirs. They researched her life and biography and then shared what they had learned with the rest of the class.
By the end of the residency, all 100 masks had been used in these exercises. Each mask had become connected to a woman, a story and a biography that had been researched and shared by the participants.As part of the communication and invitation to take part in the final action, I was interviewed by Diario Sur, which helped bring the project and the call for participants to a wider audience. Verónica Ruth Frías was also an important part of making this communication possible.
On 30 April, around 50 people of different ages gathered in the square in front of the Town Hall of Villanueva del Rosario to take part in the performance.
The children approached with curiosity and discovered the stories of the women represented on the masks. The older women, on the other hand, shared their own memories and talked about what the world was like when they were young. The activity gradually became a space for exchange between generations.
For me, this residency was important because Free Female Power began to move from an idea into an experience. The first exercises helped me define the proposal more clearly and understand what could happen when the masks came into contact with other people.
