Juliana Rigol

The desire to experiment my ideas was always the reason behind my life decisions. The pregnancy, the childbirthes and motherhood as a latin-american immigrant was a great milestone of self-realization as a chance to change my life towards a different direction.

I immigrated with the desire to experience life in a unique way, breaking my own expectations and conditioning. I wanted to find meaning in existing in a different time, living the cycles of life, with new affectations, less coerced economic living based on disputes over basic needs, vacation entitlements and a fragile sense of subordination.

I wished for a slower paced everyday life, one that would allow me to feel more present and reflexive. I had a will to hunt for references that would satisfy my intellectual curiosity and existential concerns.

The experiences of giving birth to and nurturing my children brought me a lot of clarity to realize my power to create, as well as my individual and social limits to transform the dystopian patriarchal reality in which we live.

I use pleasure-and-desire as my prima-idea, composed of sensations.

They are perceived using the body, and not through moral reason, which prohibits expressiveness. Feelings are movements of sensations, of sensorial flow. One senses by placing oneself in a relationship with something or somebody outside, impling interconnection and interdependence with what appears disjointed.

I start from desire and sensorial pleasure to arrive at the body that possesses the uterus, this organ of historical difference from the reality of control and moral and repressive discipline. The womb, as a metaphor for the creative power that is the property of a body that desires, that owns volition. The uterus, in its creative form, is the creator of oxytocinogen, endorphinogen, relational pleasure and the producer of protective female virility, in the mammalian, organic, sexual and sensual conception, not objectified, not captured by the desire of the other, disobedient to retain what it gestates, expansive, beyond the comparative limit with other organs. Thinking about pleasure from the womb provokes explosions of amusingly apocalyptic ideas, at the same time as confronting moral conceptions, challenging the patriarchal system of domination through physical and subjective oppression, abuse and the normalization of historical violence.

From the desire for pleasure to discovering who I am in my most spontaneous and integral version, artmaking was revealed to me. It has been a rememberance of an innocent, virile, daring and voracious essence that produces feelings of openness, new desires and an expansion of the mátriaconsciousness.

The patriarchal world that violently imposes the hegemonic social reality is an aberrant dystopia that tenses me up every day. I am a Latin American immigrant woman and a mother, who is outraged by the colonial macropower structured on race-gender domination, so I look for ways to implode it from the inside out, using the limits and body overflows as a remedy for micropolitical resistancy.

Being an artist is my antidote.
I find in artmaking a way of subverting my life and colonial prophecies of destiny.

It's the way I find to truly evolve myself in social transformation, carrying the utopia of a world where systemic domination will not determine the way social life is structured.