Announcing the winners of `La cultura es femenina´ 2020 Awards

Eva’s Portraits by Cristi Pérez

Cristi Pérez, a visual artist is the winner of the Award to the Most Feminist Art Work, in the Art category for her photography series Retratos de Eva (Eva's Portraits) in which she represents a contemporary female figure, wrapped in her own cycles, knowing herself well and showing her inner self `with and without fear´, by breaking apart and multiplying to improve herself.

Urban Art by Aline Machado & Lara Estévez Mora

Aline Machado & Lara Estévez Mora and their entry LIBERarte (FREEart) are the winners of the Urban Art Residence La Cultura es Femenina 2020. Machado & Estévez Mora will produce a wall installation where themselves alongside volunteers will work together. They explain that `the mural will be carried out through the cross stitch technique, using a metal mesh base or nails strategically placed on the wall to work on, then fill them in a certain pattern with wool and thus collectively create an illustration that represents the current needs of female artists´.

‘Artivism’ experimental music by Maia Koenig

Maia Koenig is an experimental music artivist who builds her own instruments and interacts with sounds of all kinds. Koenig has been immersed in activities such as poetic self-publishing, fanzines, theatre, retro-games and toy recycling. She performed at festivals and cultural centres in Bolivia, Uruguay and Argentina where she presented Exe de Feminoise Latinoamérica and, in 2019 she toured with her Tour Europia through Spain, France, Austria, Ukraine and Italy. She currently resides in Barcelona, ​​where she expands her knowledge and shares it in concerts and workshops.

Residence of historical literature for Yanet Acosta

The writer, journalist and teacher Yanet Acosta is the winner of the historical literature residence. She is the author of well-known novels like El chef ha muerto (2011), No hay trabajo bueno (2013), the book Noches sin sexo (2014) and Matar al padre (2017). Acosta has collaborated with Paco Roncero, a Madrid based chef, on a book about him, titled Correr, cocinar y ser feliz (2014). The book has been awarded the Gourmand World Cookbook Award in the section of Best Health and Nutrition book. She has been a contributor to different general media and magazines specialized in gastronomy. The winning proposal is entitled Las mujeres de Colón with which she will tackle the crew of Columbus's trips to the New World. The presence of women among the crew members is only documented since the second trip, but it is not ruled out among researchers there is a possibility that also on the first trip a woman was on board, when they passed the Canary Islands. 

Other awards

El Laboratorio has decided to also reward several initiatives, institutions and cultural personalities whose key element is their fight for gender equality:

The newspaper EL PAÍS for its correspondent on gender

One of the winners is the newspaper El País, a media outlet that has managed to adapt and put itself ahead of this social change. Since 1976 they have reported, when no one else did, about Spanish women taking flights to London to have legal abortions, a practice at that time still illegal in Spain. They have committed to the journey for equality since 42 years already. Also, in 2001, the newspaper pioneered in counting the number of fatalities due to sexual violence. They were even ahead of the administrations themselves. This newspaper has a clear gender correspondence, whose objective is to plan and improve the current coverage on these issues. The first correspondent is Pilar Álvarez (Granada, 1977), a journalist with a career of more than 15 years, who has covered social issues and has specialized in equality issues.

HER Festival

La Cultura Es Femenina 2020 rewards Alejandra Galo, the director of HER Festival to celebrate the influence of the festival’s initiative, from a committed but also playful perspective, for setting quotas in favour of women and so, for serving as a platform to make the art works of Canarian female artists visible both nationally and internationally. Galo states: “I thought it would be interesting to investigate what was happening, especially in the world of music, using the data that other associations are collecting and it turned out as I feared: the equality we presume is not real. Inequality continues to affect all sectors and industries, including the cultural, musical and festival industry as well. HER has grown from the desire to fight this inequality”.

Centro de Arte La Regenta

The of La Cultura Es Femenina rewards the contemporary art space La Regenta, a Las Palmas de Gran Canaria based organization which, in recent years, has been working towards gender equality and has presented the largest number of female artists in their exhibitions.

Magüi González and Clara Capitão, against the `glass ceiling´

Finally, the jury has distinguished two women of great importance in the cultural environment, who have managed to break the glass ceiling in this discipline. One of them is the Canarian architect Magüi González, who won the Canarian Architecture Award in 1996 and 2006, and was a finalist at FAD Awards 2006 and at X Biennial of Spanish Architecture Awards. Her work is characterized by a meditative architecture where daylight and the sea have a great influence. Throughout her career, Magüi González has won international design competitions such as the Rehabilitation of the Gabinete Literario de Las Palmas, which is currently underway, the expansion of the Centro de Arte La Regenta and the Waterfront of Puerto del Rosario.

The other professional who has managed to break the glass ceiling in her sector is Clara Capitão, the General Director of the Portuguese office of Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial. She shares the responsibility for the Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial with Patxi Beascoa, a member of the Steering Committee of Penguin Random House Spain. Capitão is also an Editorial Director, directly responsible for the two literary labels of Penguin Random House in Portugal, Alfaguara and Companhia das Letras.