Lo que la Ñapanga me contó...
“Lo que la Ñapanga me contó,
Es que las miradas nunca se irán…
Y al final de todo, me preguntó:
¿Valió la pena?
Macha mija”
2025
Wool, cotton, laser-cut flowers appliqués and lace, brass buttons, paper fastners
By exploring historical costume from a country that was colonized by the spanish empire, the Ñapangas were a specific social class of mixed race women from Quito, Ecuador that existed from the XVIII century and went on through begininings of the XX century. Their name Ñapanga comes from kichwa, describing their trait of walking barefoot with grace and beauty, specially on a city like Quito in 1868, where the streets used to be covered by the mud and sand.
They were highly entrepreneurial, working as cookers, seamstresses, sex workers, flower ladies, marketers. The descriptions of their grace and their gesture of covering their faces from the sun and for anonymacy, a gesture that would also be present in other colonial capitals such as Lima or Popayán, also came description of the social outrage they caused by their presence, being criticized by religious institutions. They would be subjects of slurs and emotional mockery. Yet they were silent participants on the process of independence of Ecuador. They infiltered in embroidery salons, taking commissions from the quitenean aristocracy. Their garments proposed an adequate anonymacy that, legend says, independist men started to dress up as them to avoid persecution and continue to communicate independist information.
Through the performance, in a another city that did had an influence on colonization like Antwerp, an economical and printing center that published missionary books and documents for the evangelization of indigenous communities in the Americas, the principal port of the metropolis receivning and exchanging merchandise coming from the colonies and concentrating ressources from extraction from the colonies, the activation managed to reenact the same emotional responses , negative and positive , that were described in the information related to the Ñapangas.
Lo que la Ñapanga me contó... questions the dynamics of emotions based on social expectations and appropietness,through the transgresive act of existing and disturbing expected routine.
They were highly entrepreneurial, working as cookers, seamstresses, sex workers, flower ladies, marketers. The descriptions of their grace and their gesture of covering their faces from the sun and for anonymacy, a gesture that would also be present in other colonial capitals such as Lima or Popayán, also came description of the social outrage they caused by their presence, being criticized by religious institutions. They would be subjects of slurs and emotional mockery. Yet they were silent participants on the process of independence of Ecuador. They infiltered in embroidery salons, taking commissions from the quitenean aristocracy. Their garments proposed an adequate anonymacy that, legend says, independist men started to dress up as them to avoid persecution and continue to communicate independist information.
Through the performance, in a another city that did had an influence on colonization like Antwerp, an economical and printing center that published missionary books and documents for the evangelization of indigenous communities in the Americas, the principal port of the metropolis receivning and exchanging merchandise coming from the colonies and concentrating ressources from extraction from the colonies, the activation managed to reenact the same emotional responses , negative and positive , that were described in the information related to the Ñapangas.
Lo que la Ñapanga me contó... questions the dynamics of emotions based on social expectations and appropietness,through the transgresive act of existing and disturbing expected routine.