Butterflies in flight: artistic research and affective resonance in the face of feminicidal violence

Abstract

Nosotras Sobrevivientes: Sustaining Life Together is an exhibition that draws from a participatory action research process that evolved into artistic research. This study was carried out with girls and adolescents who had experienced a continuum of feminicidal violence and who had also lived, for a period, in a rehabilitation center in Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, Jalisco. In this article, artistic research is understood as a practice of situated knowledge, where collective creation becomes a mode of inquiry and relation. The exhibition incorporated devices of resonance, such as a guestbook with open questions and paper butterflies on which visitors wrote messages to the creators. These devices functioned as a living archive, not as a repository but as a shifting weave of sensibilities and ethical responses.

Drawing on the ideas of Rita Segato, Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed and Pablo Martínez-Zárate, this text situates agrammatical languages, eccentric pedagogy and artistic practices as ways of interrupting habituation to violence without fetishizing pain. The focus is not on empowerment narratives or on reparative closures. It is on what becomes possible when research intertwines with collective creation as a threshold for thinking, feeling and acting in common. Rather than offering solutions, the experience opens fissures through which to experiment with research and pedagogical practices that place imagination, tenderness and care at the center in contexts marked by structural violence.