Andrea Ortega and Diana Betanzos are activists and narrative practitioners based in Mexico. Narrative practice, also known as narrative therapy, is a collaborative approach to working with people that considers everyone experts in their own lives and makes space for listening and recording people’s ability to solve their own problems. Andrea and Diana use narrative practices to document the movement against femicide on the periphery of Mexico City and to create solidarity and momentum in this struggle. In their film with Alex, Re-Authoring Narratives, they describe how they build cultures of resistance and care through choosing which questions they ask, listening carefully and retelling stories in ways that make people stronger. They meet with leading activist Irinea Buendía on the edge of Bordo de Xochiaca, a canal where the bodies of many murdered girls and women have been found, and emphasise the importance in speaking from place. The film concludes with a demonstration of narrative practice enacted between Andrea and Diana to affirm the strength and tenderness that characterises the movement against femicide they are part of.<p></p>
NTRO Output Category
- Original Creative Work : Other
Place
Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, MexicoVenue
La Trobe Art InstituteNTRO Publisher
https://www.latrobe.edu.au/art-institute/exhibitions/storytelling-liberationMedium
4K Video with soundResearch Statement
This film sits within the fields of contemporary art, feminist and anticolonial visual anthropology, and narrative practice. It investigates how activists and narrative practitioners Andre Ortega and Diana Betanzos collaborate with the anti-femicide movement in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, Mexico. The research addresses the ways dominant media and institutional discourses construct those affected by gendered violence as victims, weakening collective agency. It explores how feminist narrative practice enables communities to re-author their own stories and, in doing so, strengthen social movements and cultures of care, aiming to expand feminist and anticolonial methodologies for collaborative storytelling and political narration.
The work contributes new knowledge by theorising and demonstrating “re-authoring narratives” as an embodied and collective method for feminist political practice. Through the filmic re-composition of Andre Ortega and Diana Betanzos’s political poetic documents, interviews, and site footage from Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, the work enacts this method of autonomous documentation and the importance of relationality to it. It foregrounds the ethical and aesthetic act of “narrating life from within life,” showing how self-determined storytelling can repair the social fabric and build solidarity among women resisting femicide.
The research significance lies in the way its study and articulation of a situated feminist method enables that method to become transversal and learned by others with shared purpose. The first exhibition of the work, as part of a dedicated exhibition for the broader project Storytelling Liberation, was staged at one of Australia’s leading university museums, La Trobe Art Institute (2025), and has since been approved for acquisition into their permanent collection.Size or Duration of Work
18:38Affiliation
Alex Martinis Roe, University of Melbourne
