Bruxas.Bruxas.

Bruxas Bruxas is an artist collective sustaining good vibrations and cosmic comradeship in search of alternative futures founded in alterity and symbiopoietic possibility. Our assemblage of critical thinkers facilitates productions ranging from drag performances, slam poetry, hip-hop to principles of anarchy, social justice, Western aesthetic emancipation, and political consciousness. These ingredients define our identities and motivate us to perform fluidly, while maintaining a common mission: making and sustaining communities through art. Artists Ciara Newton, Kristina Davis, and Xalli Zuniga are the founding members of our socially conscious collective, where we unite to create constellations grappling with intersections of race, oppression, supremacy, and community. We celebrate performance, allyship, and creative pedagogy for an ongoing collage of Otherness.

The coven has made it its mission to channel vitality into a project of alternative futurity, an attempt to bring about the social and cultural conditions necessary for change. Drawing from the powerful legacies of previous feminist “político” covens immersed in anti-capitalist resistance, our clarion call echoes the Manifesto that the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (2020) issued in the 1960s where they stated that, “There is no “joining” WITCH. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch. You make your own rules. You are free and beautiful [...] You are a Witch by saying aloud, “I am a Witch” three times, and thinking about that. You are a Witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal” (Fahs, p. 288). Bruxas are grounded in overcoming patriarchal, heterosexist, capitalist, and colonial systems of domination/oppression. The collective originally formed in Happy Valley, (State College), Pennsylvania. However, Bruxas are currently active in Mexico, Ghana, France, Thailand and Chile. The sustenance we seek to provide one another is meant to operate via transnational and horizontal matriarchal care. 

As knowledge pollinators, Bruxas are aware of the urgent need for activating spaces where visual and political literacy can be developed communally. Bruxas live precariously in the Capitalocene, yet our solidarity to one another is our lifeblood. Together, members are able to focus on social and subversive actions—a collective aggression that has been tapped and gleaned from our individual practices. Here, as Bruxas, artists are able to challenge the unbearable passivity that is produced within colonial spaces. The collective’s every action resists the depletion of our power as Bruxas fearlessly critique aesthetic reification proper to institutions such as schools, museums, and art gallery systems.