Rossana Mercado-Rojas participated in Domestic Systemic Pandemic with her performative installation work 'Pater Familias' paint on printed documents, which was live-streamed during the opening night: find fb-event here.  

'Pater Familias' gathers photocopies of documents issued along eight years of process in Peru for getting sole custody of my child, up until today with the ongoing migration process of bringing my son to Sweden. The words “father”, “god” and “husband” are repeated in a lot of the documents, even when the father is completely absent in these processes. The piece reflects the violence in which institutions force women to go through long evaluations that demand money, time, and emotional waste in order to reinforce the “pater familias-figure”, where a family is incomplete without a father, without a husband.

I covered these documents with tracing paper, on which I drew portraits of my son using cooking oil. Portraits of how I remember him when these events occurred. They were based on the absence and remembrance of how I think and feel about my child on top of the documents that foster his absence.

-Holy father, father of god.

/R. Mercado-Rojas, 2018

Rossana Mercado-Rojas (1982, Perú) is an artist, independent curator and cultural manager. She holds a MFA in Curatorial practices from the Konstfack College

and a BA in Painting from Pontifical Catholic University from Peru.

Since Rossana did an artist talk back in 2017 in relation to Galleri Majkens exhibition MOTHERS – The Personal is Political, she has been collaborating with the gallery. From being a board member and having her first solo show HYSTERISKA HISTORISKA produced and curated by Galleri Majkens, to also co-curate and produce group exhibitions such as Min kropp, mitt val/Mi Cuerpa, Mi Decisión and Domestic Systemic Pandemic in 2020. 

Rossana Mercado-Rojas has shown her work and/or managed several interdisciplinary art projects at venues in Perú, Sweden, Mexico and the US. Her work as curator and cultural manager led her to focus on the problematic and possibilities of public space. By 2012 she starts the women artists collective Hysterix that focus on activism through multidisciplinary interventions at public spaces. Since 2013, she is part of the cultural association PUNKU that investigates personal development and pedagogy through the arts in public spaces.

Mercado has been the administrator of the convergence house TierrActiva (COP20 and Cumbre de los Pueblos, 2014). She is co creator of the music festival at public spaces Malvinazo fest (2013).

Her main interests are public space, gender, empowerment and development through art pedagogy.

About Hysterix (Peru, 2012)

Hysterix is a women artist collective that focuses on activism through multidisciplinary interventions at public and private spaces. Hysterix holds transgression as main methodology and viscerality as core aesthetics.

We explore counter-rational ways to develop and perform collective work in order to question dichotomy and inequity of value of the rational, related to male, and emotional, related to female.

We embrace Hysteria.

• Press coverage about Hysteriska Historiska

by Macarena Dusant for Kultwatch (in Swedish) 

Insta: @rossanacondamr

www.rossanaconda.com