In September, María José Contreras—a Chilean performance artist, associate professor at Universidad Católica’s School of the Arts, and researcher at the Núcleo Milenio Arte, Performatividad y Activismo—traveled to New York to participate in the symposium What We Can Do When There’s Nothing to Be Done, organized by Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD).
The symposium marked the tenth anniversary of the CSSD and the fifth anniversary of its Women Creating Change project. Since 2013, Contreras has been a member of Women Mobilizing Memory, a CSSD working group that uses gender as an analytic lens to explore women's acts of witness and testimony in response to social vulnerability and historical trauma. The group brings together artists, writers, activists, and scholars to develop collaborative forms of scholarship and creative expression.
As part of her involvement in Women Mobilizing Memory, Contreras has presented several performances: Habeas Corpus at the Palacio de Tribunales in Santiago during the group’s 2013 annual meeting, Nuestra Amnesia at the IX Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute in Montreal (2014), and Prótesis during the group’s second workshop in Istanbul (2014).
At the symposium, Contreras joined a distinguished lineup of feminist scholars, artists, and activists, including Judith Butler, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Ricardo Domínguez. In her presentation, she reflected on the recent surge of feminist movements in Chile, describing them as a “feminist tsunami.” She discussed the context and political impact of the so-called “feminist May” of 2018 and analyzed the power of embodied feminist methods of protest seen during university occupations and mass demonstrations across Chile.
