Free Checkerboard Woman

Isabel Cavenecia received a grant to develop new work. Free Checkerboard Woman is a black-checkered entity that falls outside conventional projections of femininity. She is a mediator between different worlds, a free being. With this project, Cavenecia will work with Jaqueline Louan to summon the spirit of Checkerboard Woman and release her on the rocks. Where exactly it will go is still unknown but Checkerboard Woman will lead the way.

Isabel often immerses herself in extreme landscapes, seeking to understand indigenous, contemporary and her own personal relationships with them. The hot humid dense Amazon in homeland Peru, which showed her the ancient spirits and how people connect with them and honour their land through rituals. Or the dry desert in the southwest of the US, with its red rocks, indigenous and new inhabitants, challenged by the lack of water, poverty and surrounded by beautiful skies. And lately she has also been diving into the cold misty swamps of motherland Holland, full of beautiful pagan history that we have forgotten after the witch burnings. Although Isabel draws inspiration from indigenous cultures, she does not consider herself a researcher; rather, she seeks connection to a universal heart-space. she looks at how people from all walks of life in history relate to their land and each other.