Josefina Mena Matriarchive includes material she collected between 1967 and 1976. She was engaged in various social, artistic and technological movements between 1967 and 1976 in Europe, Africa, and South America. Her life trajectory, architectural projects, art world links and political activism are framed in early intersectional, ecofeminist and decolonial practices.
Mena’s fifty years’ documentary collection includes material from Cecilia Vicuña (poet, artist), Cohen Wessing (War photographer), Gustav Metzger (developer of the Auto-Destructive Art concept), the ‘Radical Technology’ collective in England (alternative technologies), Maurice Wilkins (Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, 1962), Social and Resistance movements such as the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, the MIR in Chile (Movement of the Revolutionary Left), among others.
Josefina Mena declares that “Resistance is a daily-active way of living” all human acts are political, and our private micro-actions affect the social macrostructures. Whether for an architectural project, a design, a collective artistic work, or a scientific publication, Mena recognizes the intersection between social class, gender, context, the natural environment and the daily personal relationships that structure social arenas. Its objective is to initiate infrapolitical changes, which alter the traditional power structures, giving autonomy and self-management to the so-called subaltern.
Mena’s aesthetic interests are political, collective and feminist all at once. Due to these interests, to approach her production’s interdisciplinary, international and delocalized network, it was necessary to develop the concept of ‘Matriarchive,’ which allows exploring the documents from different perspectives. The JMA Matriarchive in resistance is a place that operates as an organic network, a matrix capable of producing multiple relationships and experiences, the past and the future altering each other. We have invited artists and academics to activate the archive, interpreting the documents from their personal stories and social-political contexts.
Josefina Mena’s work as an architect saw her take on groundbreaking experimental projects as she sought to press forward and further the socialist and ecofeminist causes. In the Spring of 1973, as Salvador Allende was beginning to build Chile up through a renewed socialist lens, he organized a competition; the subject of the competition was defined as “pilot for a project for urban redevelopment in the center of Santiago”. Architects were tasked with creating designs for potential construction projects in the Chilean capital. Allende believed that it was time for a “period of structural changes that [would] force the basis of the future socialist society”.
Although Josefina did not win the competition, she earned a special mention. Her idea to create an all-inclusive, living-working-learning community ran against the Western norm of capitalistic society, which segregated areas of life in a rigid, controlled fashion. Josefina believed that Latin American society could not be organized within the Western mold and needed to be rethought within the context of class consciousness and social divides. “All Power to the people, for the people” was a key point of her proposal.
The Holand war photographer Koen Wessing is an important figure on the timeline of Josefina’s career; their relationship yielded some of Josefina’s most riveting protest publications, specifically those that discussed the Chilean Revolution. After meeting in Chile during Allende’s rise to power, Koen and Josefina bonded over a shared interest in the socialist process. Although Josefina would depart from Chile on the eve of General Pinochet’s September 11, 1973 coup d’etat, Koen would remain in the country to photograph the swelling chaos. He was one of few photographers able to document the Chilean coup, making his photos especially rare. When the pair reunited in Amsterdam later that year, a depressed Wessing gave Josefina a number of original photos from the conflict. She used the photos to develop posters that highlighted the Chilean struggle and the socialist commitment to freedom, which were distributed internationally to spread the message. Despite his depressive episode, Wessing continued to live and work as a photographer. In 1978, he found himself back in Latin America amidst the upheaval of the Sandinista socialist revolution in Nicaragua. His eye never faltered, and the images from this era capture the intense ferocity of the war in full force.
Josefina Mena occupied a space in the progressive movement which was unique for the time; her intersection of feminist and socialist agendas was radical and exposed the long-conditioned conflict which existed between them. In the early 20th century, the socialist and communist movements which sprouted up in places like the USSR were carried out in blatant ignorance of the societal struggles of Women. It became clear to certain progressive thinkers like Leon Trotsky and Alexandra Kollantai that the feminist and socialist causes were actually fundamentally intertwined, and that it was the same bureaucratic system that was oppressing women for their sex, people of color for their race, and the working class for its labor. Despite the efforts of these early Marxist-influenced figures, the mainstream socialist agenda continued to uphold the traditional hierarchical sex structure and family unit which saw women subjugated into domestic servitude.
By the 1970s, the feminist battle had gripped society in full swing, running parallel to the socialist revolutions in places like Portugal and Chile. In the fashion of the aforementioned philosophies, Josefina’s staunch feminist values did not impede her dedication or support of the furthering of socialist causes; rather, she sought to highlight the intersection between the two, undertaking projects which intended to re-design the idea of class structure and the traditional, capitalistic pattern of life, while also uplifting the role of women and imagining a society based on equality between sexes. Josefina worked with a desire for intersectional, universal abolition of oppression. As outlined in a League for Socialist Action (LSA) pamphlet from 1975, author Sabina Roberts argues that no true socialist revolution can be achieved without the participation of women and that the liberation of women and the working class are forever bound to each other.
