RAYANAS: AN EXPERIENCE OF BRINGING TOGETHER IMAGES AND CONNECTIONS BETWEEN LATIN AMERICAN WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS

Abstract

Rayanas is a collective virtual experience created by Latin American women, based on relational and photographic practices, during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, just after the virtual workshop Irreverencias Fotográficas (Photographic Irreverence), promoted by M.A.f.I.A. (Movimiento Argentino de Fotógrafxs Independientes Autoconvocadxs - Argentine Movement of Independent Self-Appointed Photographers), we formed a new group of seven photographers (five Argentine, one Brazilian, and one Colombian) and proposed the decentralization of individual authorship and the subversion of the hegemonic gaze through collective editing and creation. The work began with self-portraits focused on the physicality of each member, which were then subjected to processes of intervention, reinterpretation, and transmutation by all. In dialogue with Latin American Cultural Studies and feminisms, the article demonstrates how photography becomes a political language with the power to evoke plurality and trust as methodological bases for shared creation, while the bodyvisual practice category articulated the inseparability of corporeality and visuality in photography. The rayanas experience has materialized as a living exercise in which the body transcended its physical limits. In this way, the participation of each and every one modified and expanded the original images, simultaneously erasing and preserving the individual and contaminated gaze. Thus, photography inaugurated a narrative in virtuality, rescuing vulnerability as a collective source of creative, visual, and political power, from a place of belonging and resistance.