Maque Pereyra// Founder of Yoggaton

I’m a multidisciplinary artist, dancer, and psychologist from Bolivia. I’m interested in decolonize and queer aesthetics/practices, as well as knowledge production with and from the body. During my Masters at UdK-HZT*, I started to place more value on the multiplicity of movement languages I have practiced and loved all my life, and to explore ways of producing knowledge from these experiences. At a time when these thoughts were very present, one day I was doing yoga while listening to reggaeton – and just started to shake my booty whilst being in downward – facing dog position.

The practice of yoggaton both raised and answered questions in myself: Why is the female body still seen through a double-standard lens for the profit of capitalism? Why should spirituality be disconnected from sensuality? – Because of the colonial policing of our bodies and minds that still prevails and continues to enforce dichotomies such as good-bad, whore-saint, civilized-savage.

Through yoggaton I came to physically understand: my body doesn’t act according to these enforced binaries and hierarchies. Allowing my own narrative to manifest is something that has helped me immensely in my decolonization process.

I draw a lot on the methodology of desculonización ( culo: ass in Spanish), coined by Re Kebra, who sees parallels between the South of the body as the „Ass of the world“. Both are full colonial wounds and in need of desculonización. In Yoggaton, the desculonial process asks us to engage in constant practice and commitment to connect politics and activism to spirituality, to engage in reflections with and from the body and to create spaces of regeneration, joy and pleasure; vital elements that were so denied to our ancestors.“

Want to know more about Maque and Yoggaton? Check out their Instagram!

* Inter-University Centre for Dance at the Berlin University of the Arts