Dominicanas
Sulamita Javier Balanutsa
The smell of the Dominican housewife’s food down the hall that is ready at 12pm sharp everyday for her family in her always impeccable house, the bodega owner that always allows you to pay her back later, the cleaning lady at the school that gets there before you even start off with your day, the concho driver that lets you in even though is fully packed so you won’t be late. Overall, the maintainers of society are mostly not given a thank you note for their selfless efforts. And in my own discomfort of how history is presented in school, my thesis is a platform that opens the door to discovering Dominican women, other than the three we repeat by memory since second grade. Dominicanas is a digital archive that contains the stories and contributions of women. Inviting the users to share the stories and experiences of women that have impacted their world helps to expand the archive with overlapping stories that define our Dominican culture today. My hope is to highlight a side of our community that is normally not shown in history and to ideally empower younger girls through these examples. This project, followed my curiosity in psychogeography and understanding the Dominican visual identity. An exploration on how we can learn, know and remember, and how we can encapsulate different voices without clashing them in a single platform.