LasTesis

LASTESIS (styled all in capital letters) are a Chilean interdisciplinary, intersectional and trans-inclusive feminist collective, whose members are Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem, Daffne Valdés Vargas and Paula Cometa Stange.

[1][7][8] The performance was then replicated across Latin America and other Spanish-speaking countries, and spread all over the world: London, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Tel Aviv, New Delhi, Tokyo, Beirut, Istanbul, Mexico City, Caracas, Lima, Buenos Aires, among other places.

[2] “Un Violador en tu Camino” (A Rapist in Your Path), a song with accompanying choreography that was first staged in front of a police station by a small group during a protest on 20 November 2019 in Valparaíso, Chile.

[4] It also drew from statistics for sexual assault in Chile, “where only 8% of resolved sexual-assault cases in 2018 ended up in some sort of conviction against the perpetrator, according to government statistics compiled by the Chilean Network Against Violence Against Women.”[5] LASTESIS performed “Un Violador en tu Camino” in Valparaíso with 50 women and people from the LGBTQIA+ community on 20 November 2019 as part of an intervention with the artistic collective, Fuego Acciones en Cemento (FAEC) in their series of public interventions Barricadas Escénicas (Theatrical Barricades).

"[6] In September 2022, at the Theater Spektakel festival in Zurich, LASTESIS gave a 4-day workshop and staged their performance RESISTENCIA o la reivindicación de un derecho colectivo (RESISTANCE or the vindication of a collective right) with more than 30 local participants.

In the antagonism between repression and pleasure, death and party, denunciation and resistance, the performance addressed the claim of the right to a life free of violence in a context of colonization and active extractivism.

[12][13] The debate in the Chilean Congress on gender parity reform coincided with the worldwide phenomenon of LASTESIS and their powerful performance “A Rapist in Your Way” (Un violador en tu camino).

[14] The two groups, represented by five masked women in the video, “call on the compañeras, the comrades because as a comandante in the Sierra Maestra once said, a compañero is someone whose lips tremble with rage in the face of injustice committed anywhere on earth” in minutes 6:05–6:20.

[14] In her essay titled Anyone Can be Pussy Riot, Jessica Gokberg explains that the groups are arguing that “transnationally collaborative governments are taking advantage of the enforced confinement during the global pandemic to escalate police brutality, army invasions, and the stripping of civil rights.

[14] In 2021, the collective published Quemar el Miedo (Set Fear on Fire) in print, and in it they outline a queerfeminist and decolonial critique of patriarchal violence based on the unique Latin American experiences of women and gender dissident persons, and in which they declare bodies and performance as the central means of transnational resistance.