Ways of Knowing – Collective interdependencies

The seminar is part of the seminar series “Ways of knowing Spring 2025” where we every Wednesday this Spring is exploring how Ways of Knowing is manifesting in the field of artistic research right now. Read more about the seminar series and find upcoming seminars.

Over a shared meal with coffee and tea, we will engage in a conversation on collectivity, interdependence, and community care within artistic practice. Using the collaborative work of Rossana Mercado-Rojas and Valeria Montti Colque as a starting point, the discussion will explore their evolving partnership across projects, roles, and contexts.

As artists, mothers, and women of Andean immigrant backgrounds, their shared practice of mutual care challenges traditional artistic labor, emphasizing the need to recognize care work as an essential part of creative production. Their friendship and community-building approach frame care as a revolutionary act. Valeria and Rossana have worked as a duo in exhibitions such as Gunnel & Anita (Bas Konsthall, Stockholm, 2022), Here for the Rain, Here for the Storm (Köttinspektionen, Uppsala, 2023), and the ongoing project Bingan Gemenskapen, commissioned by Gotlands Museum. Their collaboration extends beyond co-creation—Rossana has performed in Valeria’s artistic universe and contributed as a producer, writer, and team member, while Valeria has shared her platform and agency to support the entrenchment of Rossana’s artistic practice within the local art scene. Their work finds common ground in material choices and approaches to fractured ancestral histories, exploring displacement and migration as spaces to (re)imagine lineage and kinship.

During this session, Rossana and Valeria will present images and footage from their projects—both their direct collaborations and those involving broader artistic networks. At the core of their practice is a commitment to creating shared spaces—whether through communal meals or celebratory gatherings—everyday rituals that invite dialogue and foster dynamic participation.

Biography

Valeria Montti Colque is a Swedish-Chilean artist of Aymara descent who works across various media. Her installations take the form of characters, deities, and mythological figures, incorporating symbolic names from Andean cosmology and a fusion of languages. This blending reflects her fluid, diasporic roots and her experience within the Chilean and South American diaspora in Europe. Collaboration is central to her practice, involving artists, family, and friends in shaping her artistic universe. A graduate of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, she has exhibited in Sweden, Chile, Norway, Spain, Bolivia, and Germany. In 2022, she was commissioned by Region Stockholm to create two new public artworks for the city’s transit system, expanding her engagement with public spaces. Her installation Apu Mama Höjden was acquired by Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Montti Colque has participated in the El Cairo Biennale: Something Else and held a solo exhibition at the Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum in Santiago (2020). She co-authored La Jardinera (Dokument Press, 2016) with historian Macarena Dusant, exploring themes of diaspora, love, grief, trauma, and gender power structures. In 2024, she represented Chile at the 60th Venice Biennale and participated in Örebro OpenArt. She is currently presenting Cosmonación – Modersberget, a monumental exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall, expanding on the pieces and themes from her Venice Biennale participation.

Rossana Mercado-Rojas is a Peruvian artist of Andean descent, born in Lima and based in Stockholm. In recent years her work creates temporary, mobile habitats through sound, murals, video, text, and spoken word. Habitats that can be easily assembled, dismantled, and transported—an approach shaped by her migration experience. Celebration as a resistance method is central to her practice. Her work reflects on imposed systems such as nation-states, and colonial legislations while addressing her fractured history and the enduring impacts of colonial wounds. Her collaborative project Ritual Domestiko (with Angélica Chávez) will be exhibited at the Art Museum of the National University of San Marcos, Lima (2025). Mercado-Rojas was a recipient of Grafikens Hus’ Call for Print 2022, presenting the results in the exhibition Fachapaz (The Fascist Peace) at Konstfrämjandet Stockholm (2023). She is one of the initiators of La Dekoloniala! (Sweden), an educational, artistic, and cultural organization that works to amplify decolonial knowledge from the Global South. Additionally, she is also a member of the collective Hysterix (Peru), a feminist street art collective focused on multidisciplinary public interventions. With them, they co-curated two exhibitions in Stockholm, "Embodying Chaos: 10 years of Hysterix" (Konsthall C, 2022) and “The Historical and Historical Annals: The Archive Made Flesh” (Botkyrka Konsthall, 2023) marking a decade of collective practice and reinterpreting archives and histories. In 2024, she was commissioned by Statens Konstråd to create the workshop Monster, Vamperras & Happy Demons during Skeppsholmensdag.  Her writings appear in Mana Magazine, VIS Nordic Journal for Artistic Research,   Public Memory Public Art Reflections on Monuments and Memorial Art Today (Statens Konstråd),  Cunning Like Doves– Inquiries with Women in the Art World, Feministisk Perspektiv, Kultwatch, and more.