Mujeres Cimarroneando el Arte

Sankofa: Cimarroneando el Archivo [Sankofa: Marooning the Archive] is an artistic-research collective that operates at the intersection of visual arts and historical-geographical inquiry. Emerging from the research project Blackness in Resistance: Territory and Regime Violence in Uruguay, led by historical geographer Ana Laura Zavala Guillén, the initiative engages critically with colonial archives to examine histories of fugitivity among Afro-descendant women in the Río de la Plata region. The project draws on Zavala Guillen’s research conducted at the Archivo General de la Nación in Montevideo and the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, engaging with archival records that document both slavery and histories of resistance and re-existence through escapes.

This initial historical research process led to a collaborative encounter between the researcher and three Afro-Uruguayan artists, Karen Antunez, Yully Da Chaga, and Mary Porto Casas, giving rise to a collective practice that reinterprets these colonial archives through artistic methodologies. Through artistic intervention, embodied research, and processes of memory activation, archival documents narrating acts of escape and self-liberation are reworked, expanded, and re-signified.

The resulting artworks become affective archives of female fugitivity, connecting historical traces with the artists’ identities and lived experiences of marronage in their own linages. By engaging with these materials, the project challenges dominant narratives that have minimised or denied Black geographies of women’s resistance in the Río de la Plata, contributing to the resignification of history and to the visibility of forms of agency and collective survival.

The collective art exhibition, Mujeres cimarroneando el arte [Women marooning the arts] inaugurated on 20 April in Montevideo, unfolds across painting, video performance, mural and street-based practices, and sound installation. Supported by international organisations, such as UNESCO and the UN Population Fund, public institutions, and Afro-descendant civil society networks, the project advances new decolonial forms of ethical engagement with diaspora heritage.