ATLANTIC WOMEN TRAVELLERS
In this book, 20 women taken from history look at themselves in the mirror. The great mirror is the Atlantic Ocean, which occupies 20 percent of the planet. Twenty times twenty faces and lives cross the water between the Old and the New World between the 15th and 20th centuries.
Some women were born and lived in America, travelled across the continent and across the ocean. Others, born in Europe, travelled to America. A back and forth, a sway, and the pages of travel diaries, letters and missives give an account of the ways in which they travelled across spaces in times when being a woman and travelling did not go hand in hand.
Fearful or adventurous, seekers of hidden treasures or inhabitants of comfortable cruise ships, women have travelled since the beginning of time. Living loke nomads, they have set out in groups to seek sustenance or the best place to spend the winter, alongside their companions. They have boarded precarious rafts to brave the Amazon, as Madame de Godin did, or ships of dubious safety to become the queen of the seas, like Isabel Barreto. They have travelled afte a love, real or invented, as Adele Hugo did; after the good of their daughters and sons, as was the case of Nisia Floresta. Or, like the Chilean Maipina de la Barra, one day they felt the call of faith that seemed so much like a way of starting over somewhere else, far from the usual gazes.
They had a plan, a dream, a chance to break out of all the bonds imposed on them through different periods and they managed to achieve their desires. Disguised - like Catherine of Erauso - or obedient and political, like the inmortalised Pocahontas from Disney. With their stuff, luggage full of treasures, and sometimes only with the clothes on their backs, they travelled to find what they really wanted along the way, following Eduarda Mansilla’s style. Or resolutely for a cause like Flora Tristán, Belén de Sárraga and Clorinda Matto de Turner.
Sometimes they were forced travellers. Captives like the girl Fuegia Basket born as Yokcushu in Tierra del Fuego.
Throughout the centuries, women travellers dreamt of their independence on board of a corvette, a train, or on the back of a horse crossing the mountains following the manner of the American Juana Manuela Gorriti or Emilia Serrano.
When they set out on a journey, many of them were stigmatised as being mad, whores or witches, as happened to Inés Suárez, Gertrudis Gómez or the Countess of Merlin.
Decentred, emancipated, betraying the place that society had built for them since immemorial times, women understood that travelling was a way of learning about the world, yes, but more than anything else, about themselves.
THE TEXT
Twenty chronicles dwell on the lives of each woman in relation to the journeys they undertook, with first-person accounts taken from diaries, letters and other missives.
THE ORACLE
Stories intertwine within each other and each woman is transformed into an archetype or arcana. Water, fire, air and earth cards accompany this journey. The result is a game that proposes to question the readers' path and to decipher the keys to their own journey.
ILUSTRATIONS
The author worked with existing images of women (drawings and engravings), to which she added different medieval registers, bringing together different symbols, periods and styles, using analogue collage technique.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alejandra Correa was born in Uruguay in 1965, although she has lived in Buenos Aires since she was 3 years old. She is a poet, editor and visual artist. She had previously worked as a journalist and graphic editor in important media in Argentina, and later dedicated herself to cultural management. In 2004 she was one of the creators and directors of the Audiovideoteca de Escritores de Buenos Aires, a programme about the audiovisual memory of Argentinean literature and theatre.
Since 2010 she has coordinated, together with Marisa Negri, the Festival de Poesía en la Escuela, and since 2016 she has run the independent publishing house La Gran Nilson. She has published poetry collections, such as Río partido, Donde olvido mi nombre, Los niños de Japón, Cuadernos de caligrafía, Maneras de ver morir a un pájaro, El nombre verdadero and La nieve. In 2022, Tinkuy published his card game Posdata.
She has been awarded with the Second National Poetry Prize of Uruguay (2014) and the First National Prize of Literature for Children and Young People of Uruguay (2014) for the book Si tuviera que escribirte, published in 2015 by Libros de las Malas compañías.
As a visual artist, she works with collage and textiles. She has illustrated the books Si tuviera que escribirte, Aventuras de pájaro, Las malqueridas and most recently, Viajeras atlánticas.
The book and the oracle can be bought as a pack or separately, in our online shop or in your favourite bookshop.
