“Art Is a Way to Fight Back”

C&AL: What was the intent behind creating Colectivo Moriviví and why was it important that it was led by women?

Colectivo Moriviví: “Intent” would be a strong word to use. Colectivo Moriviví started out as a group of students from Puerto Rico’s Central High School of Visual Arts (Escuela Especializada Central de Artes Visuales) that wanted to participate in the local urban art festival, Santurce es Ley. As it turns out the ones that ended up doing the arrangements and finishing the mural were all young women. In that space, we chose our name and quickly realized the potential that muralism had in engaging with the community. Now we have been a collective for more than seven years.

Even though we weren’t intentionally founded as an all women collective, we believe that it was a natural result of our reality as women. It’s important to underline the fact that we were still very young, growing as individuals, and it became part of our process of finding and practicing our feminism. We learned that as women we treasured and needed a space for and by us. Now, we want to expose women’s issues and perspectives in order to contribute to our social collective memory. We also believe that art is a powerful activism tool, and we support other feminist groups either by collaborating with them or using them as subject of our pieces in a way that we contribute to visibilize their efforts.

C&AL: You collaborate with communities, their voices are present in the murals. Can you talk about some of these communities and the impact if this interaction upon the final piece of work?

CM: There’s art for the community and with the community. Making public art and participating in Urban Art festivals made us conscious that we wanted to strengthen our communities and evade putting them at risk by facilitating gentrification. When doing community projects, it is key to contribute to the work that is already being done. This is why we collaborate with community leaders and/or local organizations to channel the projects. We’ve been honoured to always be invited to these spaces and we facilitate the representations of their narratives into art. This can be workshops, community meetings, and of course, the community mural painting sessions.

In Puerto Rico, we’ve worked with different communities and organizations. Most of our work has been done with children, teenagers and all women groups. Some of our first projects with community members were collaborations with boys and girls clubs of Carolina and Loíza. Both predominantly black local communities, especially the latter. There we worked with black representation and our roots. Also, the women’s rights organization Coordinadora Paz para la Mujer is one of our closest collaborators to this day.

Involving the local community in the process of the creation of the mural has many meaningful aspects. Firstly, the community has a sense of belonging towards the artwork. On another note, the painting sessions serve as art as therapy, where all folks can enjoy painting and playing with paint to clear their minds. Those sessions also help everybody to be closer to each other and work together. Lastly, when we conceptualize together it’s a space that can be very powerful. On some occasions people can learn from each other their own history, they can also find that they feel a certain way about aspects of their community, it becomes a space of freedom of expression and creative expression. We all find what is most meaningful for us to exalt, represent, denounce or expose.

C&AL: A lot of your work is fighting erasure in Puerto Rico through visual narratives and collective imagination. What inspired these themes?

CM: Our reality as a colony is that our history has been abruptly shaken, our social discourse transmuted to fit and work towards the interests of our colonizers. There is so much that has been chosen to not be treated as historically important or not openly recognized as part of our culture. School doesn’t give us access to that history, so art is a way to fight back. Art helps us to put the pieces together, to find the narratives in our lives that reflect the macro-reality that many time circles back to our collective trauma as colonized people.

C&AL: The work of the Colectivo has also experienced censorship and pushback. What impact did that have on your work?

CM: We believe that when we face disagreement, pushback or censorship it means that we are putting out there something relevant in our social discourse. The truth is that it fuels much needed attention around the subject, whether it’s race, a woman’s body or our colonial reality. We rather have that than just art that is considered beautiful. It’s also important to document everything to then have an even more powerful narrative.

C&AL: Looking at the art scene in the Latin Caribbean, what is the importance of a women led collective like yours?

CM: Like in any other field, women were deprived of their voices and space for a long time. That’s why there are so many women led groups. We are saying what we had to keep in silence for so long in history.

The most wonderful thing is that not just muralists or artists groups are doing all these things. From different fields we connect our projects, we collaborate, we lift and support each other creating a web of “happenings” for change; it a kind of ecosystem. Instead of hierarchy: relations.

It’s important to say that we find that a lot of women-led initiatives focus more on community work and making community, than their male counterparts, both in the present and historically. We believe it is because we have a collective need to create those spaces and nurture our community. The same can be said of any other group that suffers from the hetero-patriarcal-white-supremacist system we live in throughout the world. All of us “others” are looking for our allies to work and fight in order to change that system.

C&AL: Your work also democratises art bringing community conversations into the public. This also can be seen as a pushback from the elitist art systems. How do you think this will influence other artists in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean?

CM: Hopefully the artworld is understanding that to stay relevant and useful we have to get out of galleries and museums. Art is not just to be contemplated but to be a part of, and in isolation, we can’t do that. Art is meant to be shared and not everybody feels welcome to a museum or can afford it. Art in the long run, becomes a lens to view our society as well as part of our history for future generations and that history has to include more than just those in power.  We hope others can see that in our practice and be inspired to walk that path in our society.

C&AL: What is the future looking like for Colectivo Moriviví?

CM: We want to open our workshop house. In such a space we would be able to train new members so that this practice can live on. This is our long-term goal. The coronavirus pandemic has definitely impacted our capability to do this. Still, we keep looking for ways to serve our community. We see more Art as Therapy Workshops in the near future and launching some new ways to make community art with physical distancing.

Wana Udobang is a storyteller and artist working at the intersection of writing, poetry, performance and film.