[Imilla]
Polleras are wide, colourful skirts that are usually associated with indigenous women from the mountains of Bolivia. They are considered a symbol of cultural identity but discrimination too, as they were originally imposed by the Spanish colonial authorities in the 16th century. In the city of Cochabamba, young women have begun to wear these garments when they go skating together as a gesture of empowerment and rebellion. In 2019, some of them formed the ImillaSkate group; the name –imilla– means girls in Aymara and Quechua, the two most widely spoken languages in Bolivia, where the majority of the population has indigenous roots.
Armed with their skates and their traditional pollera skirts, the imillaskaters occupy a public space that is often unsafe for them, and they do so by taking over an urban sport which has been imported from the States and is often practised by men. Their jumps, races and acrobatics are, as they say, a cry for inclusion and a powerful act of resistance.
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Born in Lajeado in 1988 and based in Bahia, Brazil, Luisa Dörr is a photographer whose work focuses mainly on women and cultural traditions. Her work has been published in magazines such as TIME, National Geographic, The New York Times, PDN, GEO, Wired and has been exhibited in Brazil, United States, Spain, France, Portugal, England or Russia in festivals such as La Gacilly, BDC Latin American Foto Festival, Luma Festival, Mois de la Photo du Grand Paris or Focus Photography Festival. She has been selected for the LensCulture Emerging Talent in 2015, and she won the POYi Documentary Project of the Year, “FIRSTS” Magazine or the Magenta Flash Forward in 2018, and the 3rd World Press Photo Award in the Portrait category in 2019. Parallel to these personal works, Luisa Dörr undertakes commissioned projects all over the world.
