This exhibition takes its title from a reference book on the social history of women in Paraguay published by the German researcher Barbara Potthast in 1996 ¿Paradise of Muhammad or Country of Women? The role of women and the family in Paraguayan society during the 19th century. Her approach to the condition of women from lateral sources, seeking to find answers in elements with no apparent relevance, gave an account of the domestic universe and the micropolitical actions of women in all social classes of the country. And, as the Paraguayan historian Ana Barreto Valinotti explains, when at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, European travelers and artists who arrived in Paraguay found themselves literally “a country of women.” Perhaps this is the intimate reason for this exhibition, to shake the memory and expose this “country of women.”  Key women in culture and art.

The Mendonca collection includes works by Paraguayan artists residing in the country, or foreigners who develop work related to its history or its imagination. This exhibition seeks to raise, from the women themselves, social and cultural problems linked to their condition. However, one element destabilizes this taxonomy: works by guest artists who, from their own place, enter this territory with poetic intensity.

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Adriana Almada 2023