María Suárez Toro & Guadalupe Urbina Win Foundation GAEA Award

June 30, 2006.  San José, Costa Rica
Feminist International Radio Endeavour (RIF/FIRE) 

Costa Ricans Guadalupe Urbina and María Suárez Toro have been selected by the Foundation GAEA of the United States as resident artists to work together on writing the theatrical production, Wings of the Butterfly, based on the recent doctoral dissertation of Suárez. 

The shared award consists of funding for two months as Sea Change Resident Artists in Provincetown, Massachusetts during 2007.  During their residency, the prizewinners´ time will be dedicated to their artistic work on the theatre production.  A scholarship of $5,500 (U.S.) each will enable them to further develop the theoretical foundation and methodology of their work, as well as have time and opportunity to share with other artists from around the world. 

The award was announced by Gaylord Neely, founder and President of GAEA, who told Urbina and Suárez that the prize is a recognition of their notable work to explore and develop alternative social realities that promote justice, creativity and sustainability.  Neely emphasized that the mission of the GAEA Foundation since its creation in 1993 is to support activists/artists in promoting the values expressed in their work and to communicate these to a wider public throughout the world. 

Wings of the Butterfly will be a musical theatre production based on the unpublished book,   Women on the Edge of Paradigmatic Change, which is likewise the name of the doctoral dissertation written by Suárez from 2003-2005.  The title of the work is based on a feminist interpretation of the "butterfly effect" of Chaos Theory that maintains that everything on the planet is so interconnected and fragile that any influence, any movement or small action in one place can trigger an immense effect elsewhere. 

This reconceptualization of the butterfly effect is documented in Suárez’s book through the symbolic experience of the African American civil rights activist, Rosa Parks, when she refused to vacate her seat on the bus to a white person during the segregationist era in the southern United States.  Her action of resistance triggered a wave of protests that flowed into a movement to abolish racist laws and promote civil rights of the black population in the public spaces. 

Suárez´s doctoral research also documents the contributions of women in different contexts whose work invigorates the current conflicts between the old Newtonian Paradigm and the proposals of emerging paradigms in the world today.  The hegemony of the mechanistic science since the epoch of Descartes and Newton 300 years ago has contributed to legitimize as unique, a vision of the world and of the nature as being like a machine, and therefore subject to being controlled by humans.  This same mechanistic paradigm equates woman with nature, and therefore subject to the same masculine or patriarchal control, and views science as a means to dominate and control the environment. 

Building new alternative paradigms requires knowledge that is based on and includes women’s perspectives and also validates an inclusive epistemology and multidimensional perspective in order to break the hegemony of the old paradigm of mechanistic science. 

The theatrical work will present, among others, cases such that of the unknown first wife of Albert Einstein, Mileva Maric, who was an eminent mathematician and physicist who likely developed with her husband many of the theoretical bases of his discoveries, although he never recognized her contributions.  Leading the artistic production will be the case of "Lucy", one of the oldest skeletons ever found, which now rests in an urn in the Museum of Addis Adebba in Ethiopia.  In the story, Lucy tells us that there is a lost paradigm, and describes what could likely have happened during the transition from matrilineal societies to patriarchy and the consequences of that paradigmatic shift for humanity and the planet. 

These women and many others have triggered further debates in science and their societies, creating science from their own experiences.  Other such women included in Suárez’s book include Tatiana Trechenko of Chernobyl, a Mayan Guatemalan woman, Francisca Alvarez, and Alda Facio and Paco Cruz of Costa Rica.  Those women affirm that they were never able to connect to a mechanistic paradigm that regarded nature and women as subjects or goods to dominate and control.