“Corazonada is intuition, the thing that exists before feeling, the action and the effect it has on the heart.” Corazonada was made during the months Giulia Gatti spent in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in Oaxaca, southern Mexico — a land that has been the object of countless accounts and depictions by travellers, scholars and artists drawn to a society known as “matriarchal”. There Gatti came to know some of the local women, who showed her the real face of their lives behind the fiction of representation. The women she portrays are active participants in their own portraits: using their bodies and their movements they stage new versions of a canon imposed on them by the gaze of others, subverting tradition and becoming the singers of a different system of power. Play, dance, eroticism, magic, hunting and the female gaze are the undisputed protagonists of a work that leaves the viewer never entirely passive and never safe from those looks — ours and theirs — as sharp as blades. What Gatti does is dance and play with the canon, taking space for her own way of seeing and leaving more of it to her protagonists: part witches and part sorceresses, girls grown up in a time and a place that seem suspended and never completely their own, women who pursue the desire for independence and strength.