On 5 November, we will inaugurate the exhibition “Dansar la fuga. Memòries dissidents des dels Andes”, an exhibition prepared by Transoceànicas as part of “Pipazos y jaranas. Folklore queer i cultures desviades”, the new event cycle at the LGTBI Centre.
This exhibition, which will be open until 30 January, invites us to look at folklore not as a static tradition, but as a living field of transformation, memory and rebellion.
Through erotic huacos, costumes, photographs, festive archives and contemporary artistic practices, ways of existing that escaped the colonial, religious and patriarchal order are revealed. Festivals, carnivals, rites and dance appear as acts of insurgency, where queerness and Andeanness are not opposed, but rather stem from the same heritage of struggle and resistance.
Andean folklore has historically been a field of tension: a living tradition and, at the same time, a sphere of colonial, patriarchal and nationalist control. However, it also constitutes a space for escape, where sexual, affective and gender dissidence have left their gestures, bodies and memories.
Andean folklore is not only an aesthetic expression or static tradition. It is also a field where symbolic battles have been fought to rein in bodies, desires and memories. This exhibition reveals how sexual, affective and gender dissidence (transvestites, marikes, machonas, morenas, non-normative identities) have inhabited festive, ritualistic and popular space from pre-Hispanic times to the present day.
From the streets of the plateau to the outskirts of major European cities, Andean communities have sustained and reimagined these traditions as identity-related, spiritual and political traits. In peripheral neighbourhoods, in community festivals or artistic interventions, folklore becomes a living archive of the diaspora: a space where mourning, joy, uprooting and desire intersect in new ways of inhabiting nostalgia.
The exhibition proposes a critical reading of folklore as embodied memory, as resistance from a place of joy, as a political gesture sustained by the collective, including outside its native region, where migration and dissidence continue to dance against oblivion.
Exhibition “Dansar la fuga. Memòries dissidents des dels Andes”
From 5 November to 30 January
By Transoceànicas
With free admission during the LGTBI Centre opening hours:
Monday–Friday, 10 am–2 pm and 3:30–8:30 pm
Open the following Saturdays: 8 November, 13 December and 10 January from 10 am–2 pm and 3 pm–8 pm
Guided tours
The exhibition has been organised by Transoceànicas, an association that defends the cultural rights of communities at risk of exclusion and promotes social transformation through art and culture.
To delve deeper into the contents of this exhibition, Transoceànicas offers three guided tours:
Guided tours of the exhibition:
19 November at 6 pm. By Christian Saavedra. Registration open: 27 October
10 December at 6 pm. By José Luis Mendoza. Registration open: 1 December.
14 January at 6 pm. By Frank Trobok. Registration open: 1 December.
Free registration at: inscripcions.barcelona.cat/visitaguiada
Places are limited