Bartolina Xixa dances in a garbage dump: body, sound and performance of a permanent coloniality

Bartolina Xixa dismantles the narrative of a white, heteronormative and homogeneous Argentine identity, with her transformist art. While dancing a vidala with an open-air garbage dump as a stage, she questions the affective culture of folklore, and presents a structure of feelings built on the experience of being permanently excluded. Bartolina “choreographs” that movement which displaces her among her different identifications: she is shown as drag queen, indigenous, gender-fluid, from the borderland and precarious. The vidala entitled “Ramita seca” (Little Dry Branch), through its fusion of vidala and rap sonorities, offers forms of retention that facilitate the creation of a collective narrative of pain, incorporating the abject, the excluded and the antagonistic into the narrative of folklore. “Ramita seca”, performed by Bartolina, proposes the emergence of a folklore of resistance that enables other social repertoires and emotional styles to become a subject.