ValeriaAndradeProaño/Sujeta a Cambios
embodiments-indisciplines

CREDITS

Conceptualization:

Valeria Andrade Proaño

Isabel González Ramírez

Editorial structure:

Edward Cooper

Valeria Andrade Proaño

Performative games:

Valeria Andrade Proaño

Design of the Cuca and woodcuts:

Rosa Elena Grijalva

Design and layout:

Susana Oviedo - ZIETTE

Illustration:

Susana Oviedo

Edward Cooper

This book finished printing in September 2025 in Quito, sponsored by the Municipality of Quito through the Secretariat of Culture.

LA JUARASJUASJUAS COLECTIVA

Nothing that exists here is made by my will alone. Everything is the product of shared action, of joint labor, of construction through dialogue and consensus, to generate a force that embraces shared feeling. Such creation is collective and is in constant movement of emotion, sensation and thought, shaping our longings. These desires are not a sum of individual wills but the expression of a transindividual desire born from the conjunction of ideas in a momentary letting go of personal limits, where wills intertwine.

In the course of that exchange, laughter always appears, an effervescent burst that sets rhythms of communion. That is what I call the carnivalization of artistic production. I take up this carnivalesque sense in the work, as a way of challenging our reality through humor, parody, irony. Humor appears as presence of mind that transforms the environment, as a dynamic of inverted reality born of our constant carnival, where order is placed neither right side up nor upside down.

The instinct to play is reawakened as a call to the childhood of desires, aspirations and intuitions; with no use other than giving momentum to the community of meaning in the moment of living together. The politics is one of collaboration and exchange that allows us not only to subsist but to produce and create from interpersonal processes where ideas are caught and mixed. This mechanics of giving and appropriating provokes other associations, new forms that hybridize languages and give formats a breadth where the personal, the social and the political cross.

WHAT IS A CUCA?

Cucas are paper dolls: paper figures with interchangeable dresses that inhabit girlhood. But here, paper becomes action, the passive doll turns into an active alter ego, and the dresses become temporal portals that prompt real people.

Cucas keep the magic of instant transformation but expand it from paper to flesh, from the private to the public, from childhood play to liberating performance. In dressing the cuca, we recognize in her an unexplored aspect of ourselves. It is the moment when projection becomes a mirror and the mirror becomes a door to territories of being not yet inhabited.

Future memories take on meaning: the dresses not only connect us with what we remember but activate memories of experiences we have not yet lived, as if the body, in dressing, gained access to a temporal archive where all the possibilities of being coexist. In that instant of recognition, the cuca stops being an alter ego and becomes a revelation: we are not playing at being someone else, but discovering who else we can become.

CUCA AUTOTRATO: INDIVIDUAL-SYMPTOM

Autotrato is understood as the individual-symptom of a whole that begins with the Other. She exists because she always has references that place and recreate her within the collective. She is the subject who operates signifiers and makes relations, as associations, to open a breach from the known and its forms toward something we can all remember, know, recognize.

Her reflections center on being and on being a woman. In her experience as a gendered person, she looks to one side, looks to the other, looks at herself and confirms diversity. A diversity that forks from a symbolic plane, from an imaginary, a language, a properly feminine genealogy, toward inner worlds marked by the experience of lunar and hormonal rhythms and intimate customs.

Settled in otherness as a subject of knowledge and a social agent, but also as an object still wounded by violence and discrimination, she raises the need to constantly review the assumptions on which culture rests. It is precisely from this vulnerability that her transformative power emerges, turning the wound into an engine of change.

CUCA LA TORERA: STREET MILITANCY

La Torera emerges from the urban echo to become street militancy of open disobedience. Her body becomes an instrument for penetrating public space, assaulting the weave of the city without warning, in the form of metaphor, game or complaint.

Her presence of mind transforms the environment: she turns the beginning and the after into chaos, which is the starting point of all possible and imaginary worlds. Taking up the carnivalesque initiatory liturgy of death and resurrection, inseparable and indispensable extremes, La Torera practices the liberation of desire.

She clings to the rupture of the barriers of the Self in affirmation of a strict monomania; she intervenes in space with the will to cross limits, using her own body as a tool. She dances, jumps, exceeds the speed of her game, turning each gesture into an act of resistance that redefines the codes of city space.

CUCA VIGOREXIA: THE NERVOUS VOICE OF AN INNER FORCE

Vigorexia is the nervous voice that emerges from the space of emptiness, of anxiety and cold, where a new sense of existence is found. She is the inner force that survives the experience of violence, which reverses the disorder to raise a voice that denounces and points straight at fear.

She unmasks the hypocrisy of the instrumental Judeo-Christian morality that acts against the social pacts yet disguises itself as good manners, silencing conscience with bribes to heaven. She rebels against the norms that limit thought and female being by regulating private and public bodily practices to sustain the regime of male domination.

She manifests in a journey through two incarnations: the force that reverses the insult and the survival of misogynist violence. These identities coexist in a world of imaginary construction that becomes reality. Each seeks the other in an inner dialogue that turns fear into indignation and indignation into action. Her body is the answer: a territory where plurality converges, without reproducing violence, hegemony or patriarchal moral prescriptions.

THREE SPACES OF PLAY

I open my hand and it extends into space. I look further in and the hand has its own space. I stretch out my arm and the little hairs cross the air, their tips bringing me new information. I exist in a place, but also in the mind. In this experience, everything is a conversation: space shapes bodily experience through its physical and symbolic structures, while the body acts on space through practices that inscribe meanings and turn the abstract into lived place.

The intimate is the sacred extension of the body, a territory where everyday rituals of self-care, reproduction and the sustaining of life unfold. It holds the founding question: who am I? It is a crossing that interweaves emotions, narratives and energetic networks, turning self-care into a silent revolution where the personal becomes cosmos.

The space of bonds is the living fabric of correspondences where care for the other and the common good are cultivated through rituals of reciprocity. This ecosystem disarms hierarchies by prioritizing shared feeling. Here care interweaves individual finitudes into communal continuity, recognizing interdependence as radical politics: to correspond is not to exchange, but to hold together the same thread of life.

The public space is street militancy: the collective body in revolt. In this territory, actions become strategy to challenge the prejudices of the context. The body interrupts norms with symbolic gestures that defy the hierarchies of what can be said, turning squares and streets into living canvases of a political action that reimagines the world.