Exhibition text:
The threads that connect us are infinite, immaterial, and surprising. They transcend time, space, generations, species, and languages, connecting us with our ancestors and their knowledge. They are networks woven by matriarchs. And these networks are in themselves venous and labyrinthine; alive like nervous systems; mycelia that communicate, guide, traverse us, and challenge us. They have saved us, sheltered us, rooted us. They alert us of the pain of our sisters and vibrate to the sound of their laughter and joy. They are red like rage, red like a uterine web, safe, cocooning, and sometimes terrifying, like a spider's web, like sorority.
Like a tangle of affections, red red réseaux presents the work of Pilar Escobar, Helena Martin Franco, Sarabeth Triviño, and Colectiva Tribu, materializing a supportive network that has existed since 2022 among women artists from the Latin American diaspora living in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. We call ourselves the Assembly of Witches. Although this iteration presents the work of only some of us, the exhibition is born out of love for the community we have been weaving and continue to weave.
A constantly expanding web, our community welcomes those who want to explore, heal, or embody the challenges, intersections, and positions that challenge us as migrant women in this territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka nation that was never ceded. We present performance and textile works that were conceived to inhabit and crawl through the rooms of the Livart, like a furtive, dissident creature. Each work is intertwined with the next and they are codependent on one another; they were created in collaboration and symbiosis. And although the materials used are flexible, malleable, and humble, the works reveal great resilience, vehemence, and solidarity with the struggles of decolonization, intersectional feminism, sustainability, gender dissidence, and migrant rights.
Inspired by pioneers in art, eco-feminism, activism, critical thinking, and writing, this textile installation and performance reproduction and presentation contraption is designed and woven for femme bodies eager to decolonize and subvert the white cube, to occupy space, to “make body.” We honor Cecilia Vicuña's quipus, the philosophy of Sayak Valencia (“bodies together can do a lot”) and Suely Rolnik (“inhabiting in network”), Louise Bourgeois' Maman, and Rita Laura Segato's writing (“we are walking land”), among many others.
This network thanks and celebrates those who came before us and those who are no longer with us. It serves as a space for trans, indigenous, migrant, working, and activist women, mothers, and artists to meet and support each other—those who are already part of it and those who will join in the future. This network is a body, a home, our red network of networks*—welcome.
* Since red is the Spanish word for network and réseaux is the French word for networks, the title of the exhibition can be read in three languages.