Turbante, color rojo y botas punk: Feminist decolonial body-mapping in co-researching with female artists group Enkelé in Colombia

This paper is a story about the productive possibilities of “grounding” knowledge in bodies for feminist co-researching practices. It explores body-mapping (Skop, 2016; Sweet & Ortiz Escalante, 2017) as a feminist decolonial tool (Gómez Grijalva 2012; Rodríguez Castro 2021) to explore the role of oral traditional music in the building-up of female artists groups in conflict-affected areas. In this case, we explore a co-constructed research with Enkelé – Voces y Tambores, an all-female artists' group based in the city of Bucaramanga in the northeastern region of Colombia. Our aim is to make a critical reflection on the use of body-mapping in feminist research by drawing upon our collective experience between the three researchers and Enkelé in March 2022. With this objective in mind, the paper first presents Enkelé with a brief context of its formation as an all-female music group in an armed conflict setting in Colombia. Second, we revisit body-mapping as a creative tool by taking a feminist decolonial stance to its concrete praxis. Third, we analyze our experience in using body-mapping for the collective reflection about three specific elements: (1) the emotional, methodological, and ethical challenges of co-researching through body-mapping; (2) the analytical lenses offered by body-mapping to understand the meaning of being a woman in a musical tradition coming from an androcentric and colonial heritage that still persists to this day; and finally; (3) the creative possibilities of body-mapping as an artistic method to produce alternative intersectional, situated and embodied perspectives on the gendered power relations in the Colombian context.