Welcome everyone,
my name is Mercedes Peón and I am a Galician composer and performer deeply committed to the survival of the local and speaking from a radical periphery through contemporary expression. My background –I immersed myself into Galician traditional music; I am inspired by things such as authenticity, originality, the purity of ideas, concepts and melodies that make me feel I belong to a community and its collective creation. I feel honoured to be part of this group of artists who share an important responsibility, from my perspective, as the she-bearers of an engaged discourse, socially positioned around topics such as questioning gender, identities, language hegemony, equality, territories and borders, belongings, trances, states of spiritual emergence and many other particularly inspiring memories and images that have made me who I am today. I would like to share my work with you, my concerns, my vision of the arts and life, my vision and that of many others, about the accepted delusions of what I call the ͞missions and submissions͟ that gender enables and embodies. In collective creation, gender is absent and thus the need to explore the tension between these collective artforms and the global patriarchy exported from Europe through colonisation. Besides, I also think we need to build bridges to trigger a true revolution – a sisterhood across subalternities.I am honoured by the fact that my fortunate position as an artist with international visibility can serve in this case as a humble vehicle for one of the most remarkable initiatives I have encountered. This initiative embodies the original spirit behind the creation of the so-called European Union, a cultural and critical axis, striving for diversity and cultural sisterhood, thus contributing to dissolving the accepted delusions of gender in the arts.
With best regards,
Mercedes Peón.
Mercedes Peón was invited to be Ambassador by Wom@rts partner Auditorio de Galicia, Spain.
