Caminando por el jardín de Domitila, se oyen las voces de la montaña.
(Walking in Domitila's garden, we hear the voices of the mountain.) “Entonces yo llegué to the conclusion that my mother se matured porque era mujer… Y me puse a llorar diciendo: ¿Para qué habre nacido yo mujer? Igual que la mamá vamos a mortir.” ("I then concluded that my mother had died because she was a woman... And I started crying, saying, 'Why was I born a woman? Just like my mother, we are going to die.'") Domitila Chungara, excerpt from the book Una vida en lucha (A Life in a Fight), 2017. Domitila Barrios de Chungara was a Bolivian miner and a prominent figure in Bolivian feminism. Coming from a modest family, she gave numerous testimonies about the suffering endured by miners in her country. The exhibition recounts the memory of the territories in Bolivia and centers around two centerpieces: sister mountains, installed in the heart of two spaces in the gallery. These monumental sculptures, made from natural, recycled, or ecological materials, invoke the memory of Cerro Rico in Potosi and Huancavelica: two mountains essential to the enrichment of the West. They tell the story of extractivism, ancient colonial practices to the contemporary quest for resources to fuel modern technologies. The mountain, initially a feminine deity, becomes the Virgin Mary (an episode recounted in the famous painting La Virgen del Cerro, 1740, unknown artist, a painting rediscovered in the 20th century), bearing on her veil the history imposed by colonization. These stories have forged power structures that still inhabit our imaginations and our bodies. The Virgin's veil, like a territory, bears the memory of the land, imprinted in the material of bodies and landscapes. Femininity is omnipresent: in the adoration of the Virgin, in the mountain perceived as a feminine deity, in the veils and skirts that dress them both. Yet, it is women who are the first victims of femicide, particularly during periods of heavy extractivist exploitation. Today, extractivism still shapes the world. Mineral extraction did not stop with the colonial era: it has transformed. Artificial intelligence, Electric cars, solar panels, and new technologies depend on these resources, intensifying their research in the formerly colonized countries of Latin America. In her sculptures, Lucia Neri tells this contemporary story by combining ecological materials with industrial elements—metal, plastic—thus questioning the ecology being constructed today.
