Action Week: Las Tesis

Las Tesis

For “Action Week” I chose a group of women from my country that has really made an impact in the world with their feminist interventions and performances. They are four women from Valparaiso, Chile named Sibila Sotomayor, Daffne Valdés, Paula Cometa Stange, and Lea Cáceres, who formed a group called “Las Tesis” about 1 and a half years ago. Their name literally translates to “The Thesis” because their purpose is to study and work with feminists’ thesis’ and convert them to a simpler performative format to reach and make an impact on more people.

They became very well known for their performances during the 2019 social revolution in Chile. The protests that arose because of a subway fare rise, turned into a massive social movement where people demanded changes, fewer injustices, and the implementation of major social reforms in different aspects of life, including feminism. Las Tesis performed a piece called “Un violador en tu camino” (A rapist in your path). It was performed multiple times by thousands of women during the protests in Chile and after a while, it became a worldwide anthem protesting violence against women. It has been performed in every continent but Antarctica, and in more than 52 countries.

The song has references to police brutality that occurred during the protests of 2019 in the lyrics and the dance that goes with it alludes to some of the abuses suffered by women in the police stations during the time. Because of this and their ability to empower and move millions of women to fight back against the systematic violence against women, the Chilean police department filed a legal complaint against them for incitement to violence and contempt for authority. This caused that more than 30 famous Hollywood actresses signed a letter to the Chilean government in their support, including people like Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman, Eva Longoria, Amy Poehler, Olivia Wilde, and many others. On top of that because of their worldwide impact they were included in the list of the most influential people of 2020 by Time magazine and have been working in conjunction with Pussy Riot.

Moving on, we can relate feminism to the subject of sustainability and environmental justice in many different aspects. First of all, we need to acknowledge that the social, economic, and environmental impacts of climate change affect different people in different ways, making the global poor more susceptible to these effects even though they’re the group that contributes less to the planet’s damage. According to the International Labour Organization, women make up nearly 70% of the world’s poor making them more susceptible to matters of environmental injustices, we can observe this in the data from the European heatwaves of 2003, where 75% more women died than men and in the Bangladesh cyclone of 1991, where five times more women died than men. Factors like lack of access to education, legal rights, social standing, gender pay gap, and many others, contribute to the inequality for women in poverty levels. Another aspect of gender inequality in climate change would be the intricate relationship between the patriarchy and the capitalist system that has contributed to climate change, where women are the most affected.

Since women are targeted as the main consumers of mass-produced products, we can relate feminism with sustainability. The market feeds off generating insecurities in women and profiting because of it. Advertisement contributes to the idea that women have to be young, thin, hairless, feminine, pretty, and many other stereotypes that move women to buy products to fulfill society’s expectations. Since these are very broad and difficult problems, for Action Week I would like to target the commercialization of “feminist products”. Nowadays we can see everything from t-shirts, tote bags, phone cases, and many more objects that include feminist slogans and profit because of them. The problem is that we can’t show our support to the feminist movement with something mass-produced at the expense of other women workers, with publicity that targets insecurities and stereotypes, and that its manufacture damages the environment.

This is why my proposal is a series of feminist designs that relate to Las Tesis’ interventions and performances that can be applied to objects in a sustainable way. Serigraphy is an ancient printing technique that uses a mesh to transfer ink into a surface, it doesn’t produce waste and nowadays there are many durable non-toxic inks you can use to make the process environmentally friendly. These designs would be translated into many serigraphy screens that can be applied to t-shirts, sweatshirts, tote bags, and many more. The surface where you can apply it can be new or it can be a way to renew some old pieces of clothing to lessen the consumption of new things from big polluting stores.

By implementing these designs we can make a difference in the consumption of the so-called feminist mass-produced objects and call attention to the fact that by buying these objects we’re contributing to the same consumerist system, damage to the environment, and unjust working conditions of the workers who make these products. Also, it’s a way of showing support to Las Tesis and what they do for the movement and it would be a way for me to contribute to the feminist movement in Chile and be involved in a sustainable production of designs.

The design series