Embodying knowledge through Latin American performance.

An Exercise of Epistemic Insurbordination

Abstract

This essay is based on the following research questions: How does Latin American performance produce and transmit knowledge? In what ways does Latin American performance construct new subjectivities and imaginaries that speak from the colonial wound and enable liberation from the theory of knowledge established in and by the Academy? How can knowledge be embodied in beings (women) who, in the Eurocentric imaginary, are considered ontologically inferior?

This text proposes a reflection on the production of embodied knowledge transmitted through Latin American feminist performative practices, aiming to challenge the hegemonic forms established in the Academy—both in the conception of art and in the production/transmission of knowledge.

Today, against these characteristics and from a decolonial paradigm, a Latin American history emerges that seeks to subvert prevailing ways of thinking and power structures in order to reconfigure dominant epistemologies. The performative actions of Latin American feminist artists involve a stance against colonial violence on bodies, proposing—through new aesthetic and ethical-political codes—alternative ways of producing knowledge through art and the body.