Helena Martin Franco, born in Colombia, has lived and worked in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal since 1998. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the blending of different artistic processes and the hybridization between traditional techniques and new technologies. Helena creates autofictions where she explores the permeability and boundaries between cultural, national and gender identities. Her artistic proposals participate in the dialogue about gender violence, immigration and artistic censorship. From a feminist perspective, she creates links between collectives and cultural organizations in order to encourage encounters and exchanges of artistic practices, notably between Canada and Colombia. She is the founder of L’Araignée, a collective for the dissemination of contemporary art; La Redhada, Red de mujeres artistas del Caribe colombiano; >CAVCA, Comunidad de artistas visuales de Cartagena y Bolívar; and Las meninas emputás! Winner of the 2018 POWERHOUSE PRIZE, with an MFA in Visual and Media Arts from the University of Quebec in Montreal, her work has been presented in the Dominican Republic, Lithuania, Spain, New Zealand, Colombia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iran, Argentina, Cuba and Canada.
On June 10 we had the privileged of hosting a Micro ConverSalon with Helena Martin, Colombian artist from Cartagena living in Montreal. Helena’s work is deeply representative of the souths from the south and the souths from the north new theories and praxis that we immigrant artist create to to invent freedoms and fight invisibility. Her video, performance and visual work respond to her feminist investigation on different manners to understand oppression, marginalization, neocolonialism, aesthetic and epistemological disobedience. Each of her works challenges concepts, theories of legitimized knowledge and aesthetics. It reassesses the plurality of feminism, and subjectivities with its diverse forms of elaboration of innovative doings.
