Colectiva Mujeres Muralistas

Under a bridge in Bogotá, on one of the most heavily transited avenues in the city, there is a place where the walls try to speak. For years, it was known far and wide, not for its centrality, but for its danger. “It’s a very, very, very dangerous area, especially for us,” remembers Julx Morales, founder of Colectiva Mujeres Muralistas (@colectivamujeresmuralistas). It was a place criss-crossed by quotidian violence, the kind that is not always named, but that one feels viscerally when they encounter it. 

 In 2019, the collective decided to intervene: Not with the presence of police, or with institutional campaigns, but with painting. The initial idea was to reclaim the space through muralism, but also to achieve something altogether more profound: To shift the negative place that it occupied in collective memory. “We were trying to make memory…and start to recount the history of different women who have been leaders in Colombia and in Latin America.” Thus, what would later become known as the “Galería Feminista” (Feminist Gallery) began to take form, a space constructed through collective processes that had already been developing years prior in graphic design and serigraphic workshops. 

Nothing in that lengthy process was improvised. Behind every image, there were encounters, conversations, exchanges between women–the shared construction of ideas: “Spaces of collective creativity…to continue developing the concepts and the basis of what we wanted to work on in that space.” Painting was only the visible layer of something much broader–a practice that combined art, pedagogy, and social movement. In this path, they didn’t only represent history, but they also offered practical tools. They adapted the violentómetro–a didactic resource in the form of a ruler, that aids in visualizing the different manifestations of violence that are often hidden in daily life–liasing with different communities and adding new care pathways and guidance. But the collective did not stop there. They felt that something else was missing–a way to not merely dwell on the identification of violence. “Even though it is important to identify ourselves as victims of violence…it is also important to know how to keep moving in order to transform that, and in what direction.” In response, the armonímetro (Peace Meter) was born, a form of imagining a better, if often distant, reality for intimate relationships.

For a period of time, the walls began to fill up with faces, names, colors. Women looking boldly ahead in space that used to force them away. Stories that were long unable to occupy spaces like these became increasingly visible. But this new visibility did not go unnoticed. Shortly after the inauguration of the space, the attacks began. First there were words, then nails, then, increasingly violent interventions. “That extremely threatening and violent discourse, solely for the fact that we are a feminist process.” The murals were covered, altered, erased. In some cases, the violence took explicit forms: “They were placing phalluses…over the bodies of the women we were portraying, and thus, we saw it as a symbolic way of threatening us with rape.”

Beyond just vandalism, what the collective experienced was a personal fight for the significance of public space, for who is allowed to speak, and who must be quiet. One of the most significant cases was the mural of Cristina Bautista, an Indigenous leader who was murdered in 2019, in what became heartbreaking evidence of the compounding risk that female leaders who are also human rights defenders face. The collective decided to paint her as an act of memorialization, and in hopes that her story would not disappear. “We wanted to give visibility to Cristina’s case, so that it wouldn’t be forgotten and remain in impunity.” The image was attacked multiple times. They covered her mouth and eyes, and erased her words as they appeared in the mural, which became “like an act of re-victimization.” Through every attempt at silencing, an obstinate response came back from the collective: Their insistence in making Cristina and others like her visible again. 

What followed was a constant cycle: Painting, erasure, painting again. “It’s approximately a year and a half that we’re painting, they censor us, then we return and repaint, then they come back and censor us again.” On one occasion, after a group intervention with dozens of artists, everything they had done was covered with grey paint in just a matter of days. “They painted with a light grey over everything that we had painted.” All their effort was reduced to a neutral surface, as if nothing had ever happened there. But for the collective, this was not the end, but just a part of a long process. Because if one thing was clear in the midst of this confrontation, it was that they were having a real impact.

“If those groups are reacting in such an extreme manner…it is because our artistic practice is creating something positive, and we need to keep doing it. The violence did not cause the collective to stop their work, although it did generate some internal tensions, as well as fear, and exhaustion. Some artists decided to distance themselves. But others insisted in remaining, in not abandoning the space, in continuing to occupy it. 

While this push and pull occurred on the walls, something else was starting to move in the people who routinely passed by–those who stopped to read, to observe, to think. Men who recognized their own behavior when confronted with tools like the violentómetro, who offered reflections: “It’s so good that you put this information there, because one doesn’t always realize that they’re doing these things.” It was not a question of confronting or accusing directly. The wager was something different: “That deep down a person might ask, Could I have sexist or misogynistic practices? In that moment of doubt, of internal questioning, there was at very least the hope of transformation.

With time, the collective began to witness wider changes. Even though the fight for respect, recognition, and equality remains an uphill battle to this day, they noticed that themes which once were not talked about began to appear in everyday settings. Many social organizations incorporated the lenses of gender. New generations arrived with different questions. It was not an immediate or uniform change, but it was perceptible nonetheless. And in the midst of this process, the Galería Feminista ceased to be only a physical space that people timidly circled, but became a reference point.

The impact crossed borders, and the experience in Bogotá did not remain there. Other spaces began to emerge in different cities, inspired by the idea of occupying public space from the perspective of feminist memory. “The gallery has gained a lot of momentum, not only here in Bogotá and on the national level, but internationally as well.” The collective began to be invited to meetings, festivals, and exchanges, including the Festival de Arte Urbano Feminino in Mexico. What was born as a local answer to a specific point of violence entered into dialogue with wider movements.

They didn’t try to replicate the model exactly, but rather, to catalyze something: The possibility that other women would claim their own spaces, tell their own stories, and construct their own memories. “We have seen that its impact has generated the impulse in other women to engage in similar exercises, to appropriate spaces and public settings to speak, question, and make memory. 

 At the same time, the original project continues looking towards the future. The Galería Feminista is not closed, not finished. It is a space that finds itself in constant construction, vulnerable, unstable, but also persistent. Today, the collective continues working to recuperate large stretches of the space, to secure resources, and to sustain their work without depending completely on institutions. There is a clear intention to reinforce their autonomy, to allow more artists to participate without needing to sacrifice all their time to precarious jobs.

But beyond all the material aspects, something else is at stake: Not only denouncing, not limiting oneself to illuminating violence, but rather, opening new possibilities.

“We are striving to generate utopias…to show a future or the futures that we can move towards,” Julx affirms.

In a world in which the feeling there is no way out often dominates, that insistence becomes deeply political. Imagining futures not as fantasy, but as practice, like something you can paint, and share. 

“It’s important that we can show a path forward.”

And that path, albeit fragile, albeit constantly threatened, does not belong to just one intersection in Bogotá. It has expanded, in the form of ideas and images. It is in those who pass by the walls and linger there, who after looking, cannot stop to ask themselves questions.