Hi! Welcome to my digital space 💟 Here you can see some more information about the work I do!
*Anahí Saravia Herrera (she/her) is (depending on the day) a writer, producer, creative researcher, and publisher-in-training. She is interested in exploring activism and histories of resistance and how we can use creative means to make critical perspectives public. She works at the intersection of community organizing, art making, and cultural work.
Currently, Anahi is thinking about and researching embodiment, performance, and feminist activism in Latin America. She is a part of the curatorial-research project peformingborders and is in a collaborationship with Jemima Yong with whom she’s developing a publishing-as-performance-practice. She also organises with feminist migrant-led campaign groups Feminist Assembly of Latin Americans and Women’s Strike Assembly. Anahi is physically based in the “west” but as much as possible, creates work situated in the Latinx diaspora, she was born in La Paz, Bolivia.
📄 My professional CV can be seen HERE.
🤝 I organize with the following groups - all of which crossover into and seed my creative work:
A little glimpse into my creative practice:
📚 PUBLISHING
Bad Review, ICA (London), June ‘23 as a part of *‘How do Institutions Choreograph Us?’, created with Jemima Yong*
A Bad Review is a critical audience survey. It is a response to the way institutions maneuver and laughs at the performance of evaluation, “relationship” management, and “data” collection. It is the first publication under the project Bad Review which is driven by “positive vengeance”* and a desire to infiltrate and disrupt.
*Positive vengeance is an internationally renowned term we use to describe feelings that arrive after the disempowerment of individuals in institutional settings, manifesting in frustration and anger. These feelings are then transformed into structural critique, reflection, and collective action.
Our Place in the Game: 2022- 2023 Community Publishing Project
The Edition of 100 zines was made in collaboration with a community group from Kings Cresent Estate, convened by Hector Dyer with support from Hackney Showroom and UCL. This publication records histories, stories and memories from the changing estate.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cs5uvhzoTBk/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading
DYCP Award (2022- 2023)
I was awarded a DYCP in 2022 to develop my community publishing practice - this is ongoing and I am currently working on:
✳️ WORKSHOPS, PERFORMANCE, others
Tangled Tongues/ Lenguas Enredadas (2023 - ongoing)
Community-led writing group focusing on the experiences of Spanish-speaking migrants.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CrRJw4pIJCr/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading
Instructions for Destruction (2022 - ongoing), created with Jemima Yong
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1djdo3sgIUKPZ_nwuzIpV7HzkoPjsw0Mr/view?usp=sharing
Instructions for Destruction is a workshop extending thinking from Rage on Stage, focusing on manifestos as sources of textual rage, anger, and future building within feminist contexts.
Manifestos are seeded from a desire to make what feel like (im)possible, (un)reasonable, and necessary demands. They are simultaneously critical writing, performance, textual screams of frustration, instructions for destruction, and scores for the future.
The workshop has so far happened in WORM (Netherlands), in September 2022. Barbican Centre, in December 2022, and in Pushkin House in March 2023.
Rage on Stage (2022- ), Camden People’s Theatre, created with Jemima Yong
Rage on Stage creates a space to think about feminist anger. What does feminist rage look like & what labor goes into creating space for it?
The work is made up of three parts. The first part was performed in Camden People's Theatre. In this part, we prepared for the performance by creating a space to think about what feminist rage is whilst we prepare hundreds of plates for the final work (+ their destruction). In this space, with the audience, we thought about the labor that goes into making space for rage and think through what the shapes and manifestations of feminist rage, exhaustion, and anger look like - helping us prepare the content for the next stage of the performance.
Cafe Collective (2021- ongoing)
As a part of FALA, I run monthly coffee mornings where we hold space for political discussion, reading and solidarity.
🌟 CURADURIA + WRITING
Co-caretaker at *performingborders:*
performingborders is a collectively run digital platform for artistic research and creation, focused on notions and lived experiences of intersectional borders through international live art and performance practices.
We work with migrant artists to commission new performance works, conduct interviews and publish journals.
Current research: Bodies in Resistance | Encuerpando Resistencia is a series of interviews and research focusing on the body as a site of resistance in feminist and performance practices. It is a series in dialogue with artists, activists, and those sitting in spaces of embodied practice, referencing the legacy of feminist Latin American movements and their work choreographing resistance. This evolving conversation-as-research aims to connect practices across the Abya Yala diaspora, linking perfomance/political practices as well as body/minds across borders. It is convened by Anahi Saravia Herrera from performingborders.
SELECTED WRITING:**
Encuerpando Resistencia: Interview with Clara Garcia on transnational feminism, performingborders, October 2022
Interview with Thais di Marco | Encuerpando Resistencia, performingborders, June 2022
Performing Solidarity: Un Violador en tu camino, Social Works? Open’ Arts Journal, May 2021
*(mis)remembering and (re)interpreting history with tara fatehi irani: mishandled archive,* Signal House Editions, April 2021
*Stitching over history, memory and collective joy - Stephanie Francis Shanahan’s Living Sculptures,* Decorating Dissidence, January 2021
Women’s Strike: A Red Thread of Feminist Resistance & Care, March 2020
Building the Barbican Archive: Forget Me Not, Barbican Website, June 2019 This Archive is Ours Too: Rebellion and representation in the Barbican archives (p.30) and Introduction (p.1), Forget Me Not exhibition publication, June 2019