The Casa do Comum auditorium was full on July 3rd for the screening of the film Revolución Puta by María Galindo (La Paz – Bolivia, 1964). Whilst travelling through Europe to attend the Venice Biennale and the Avignon Festival, the artist and de-colonial feminist activist was invited to Lisbon by collectives such as Sirigaita, Biblioteka, Left Hand Rotation and Manas, among others. After the screening, Galindo provocatively said: “This film is not an artistic object”. Made with few resources, almost an UFO for a certain Western aesthetic perspective – somewhere between a documentary, an experimental film and a videotaped political manifesto – Revolución Puta appeals not only because of its form, but also due to the issues it draws attention to.

It begins with an image of a dozen masked women dressed in red walking through La Paz and the neighbouring city of El Alto, randomly stopping people on the streets and markets. It seems to be morning, the time when cities are just waking up and the working wheels are starting to grind. The brutal approach is always the same: “I’m a whore, a prostitute, a sex worker. What’s the difference between your job and mine?”. They’re not actresses. We watch the responses of men and women, young and old; many of them say “I don’t know”, or “None, you do what you can to put food on the table for yourself and your children”.

The issue of prostitution or sex work has been dividing feminists for at least 50 years, between those who abolish “prostitution” and others who advocate decriminalising and/or regulating “sex work”. The terminology used by both camps reveals the schism in their stances. The former claim that “prostitution” is synonymous with men’s oppression of women and that no woman can genuinely want to “prostitute” herself; the latter assert that women are free to use their bodies as they see fit, without moral or religious constraints upon them, and that they may choose to work in this way or in any other.

These academic categories, which have been coined by Western feminist theorists over the last few decades, prove insufficient to express many women’s empirical reality. In her essay Cara de Puta[1], Galindo claims that one of the drawbacks is that “the debate arrived by plane with ready-made arguments and authors who had to be canonised beforehand”. To overcome this, “it’s absolutely necessary to step outside this simplifying binarism (…)” and this is why the documentary attempts to play with “the inaccuracy of using the words ‘whore’, ‘sex work’ and ‘prostitution’ interchangeably”.

As with any de-colonial thinking endeavour, this documentary urges us to abandon previous thought categories to look at bodies and listen to the discourse of the other hemisphere, with our minds as untarnished as possible. Advocating a callejera approach to feminism, a way of thinking that arises and grows on the streets and not in academia or books, Galindo encourages us to reflect on street questions and answers, on an “intuitive feminism that has neither read Beauvoir nor Butler, but can read its own reality, a feminism that has studied the bodies of mothers, women’s prisons, the toilets of dead-end bus stations, and all borders[2].

The documentary moves on to the second part, where, on the terrace of a house, several masked women discuss their science, their expertise on sexuality and male psychology, acquired over years of work. Themes such as the importance of independence from any kind of pimp or staying emotionally unbiased towards the client – “never fall in love with the client” – are addressed from a first-person perspective. A covert man appears, the women trample and jump on his body. They laugh.

The third part includes a testament from the only woman in the film whose face is uncovered. The use of masks protects their identity and also acts as a collective statement of the struggle. However, one woman does step forward to speak on her own account, a woman in her sixties, Cristina, born in Brazil but an emigrant in South America and undocumented for over 30 years, sharing her story as a sex worker with a group of women, detailing it and announcing her retirement. One enters, but one also quits – and at what cost?

The final section deals with a symbolic confrontation between these women and the Bolivian state: they publicly reveal the hypocrisy of their relationship with this issue in front of the hundreds who gather daily in Plaza San Francisco, right in the heart of La Paz – they discuss health issues, among others. The film ends with the symbolic burning, not of witches by the Spanish Inquisition, but of a giant sign representing a state building on behalf of “the granddaughters of the witches they could not burn”.

The whole film aesthetic is defiant, incendiary: the neon red letters signalling each section, the women’s outfits. Once the screening ends, Galindo shares with the audience that this project is the outcome of 20 years of work by her and Mujeres Creando, the feminist collective she co-founded in Bolivia. In reality, this method of filling the public arena and its aesthetics can be traced back to previous works. One example is the short film Virgen Cerro[3], questioning Bolivia’s colonial past through a callejera recreation of the anonymous eighteenth-century painting of the same name.

Presented this year at the Venice Biennale – despite Galindo’s claim that this is not a festival film, as it travelled through Bolivian villages, towns and cities before arriving here, watched by mothers, daughters and grandmothers -, it is part of the Desobedience Archive, a database first conceived by Marco Scotini in 2005 that gathers different audiovisual materials that, in one way or another, question the relationship between artistic practices and political actions.

But Galindo’s leading role in this edition of the Festival was not limited to the film screening. As an invited de-colonial art critic, she participated in this edition, whose theme was Foreigners Everywhere, in a clear attempt to be part of the movement to decolonise Western art institutions. As a critic, María Galindo centred on the Spanish pavilion and the unprecedented choice of an artist of Peruvian origin, Sandra Gamarra, to represent the country with the exhibition Pinacoteca Migrante. It includes excerpts from various authors, including Françoise Vergès, a French art critic and sociologist whose book Decolonising the Museum was recently published in Portugal. During the long conversation between the two[4], shared as a video on social media, Galindo constantly questions Gamarra as to whether there is actually a decolonising will by the Spanish state in its political and cultural discourse, or whether this choice is just another cover-up to “change something to keep everything the same”. An important reflection that applies to several European artistic institutions at a historical moment when the decolonising discourse is on the verge of becoming a genuine critical force or being absorbed by the status quo.

[1] Galindo, Maria. (2020). “Cara de Puta”. In Revista de la Universidad de Mexico. Available in: <https://www.revistadelauniversidad.mx/articles/36245f98-05d4-4d15-ae86-a3a22ee81c25/cara-de-puta>.
[2] Galindo, Maria. La jaula invisible. Text written for a performance at The Parliament of Bodies, Bergen, 2019, and reenacted in 2020 at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.
[3] Available in <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDU64HcMaZo&t=375s>.
[4] Available in <https://www.arteinformado.com/magazine/n/encuentro-critico-entre-maria-galindo-y-sandra-gamarra-en-la-bienal-de-venecia-7271?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3phiS0kkAEoSl8mIYmxGuhIcQzoBL1JOFb37bNwfnJwODPJbdCYKj6rQs_aem_OQkaNc2CLVgQ1GoTcTv7ug>.