“La piel se vuelve frotera debido a un sistema patriarcal e individualista que ha hecho del cuerpo un Estado, ha hecho del cuerpo una Iglesia, ha hecho del cuerpo una religión, ha hecho del cuerpo una propiedad privada” (Paredes 2011)
In seeking to decolonize itself and its communities, Mujeres Creando Comunidad simultaneously centers the body and blurs the borders between oneself and others. The body is the surface upon which our identities are written, the point of contact between internal and external worlds (Alfaro 2008-2010). It is a political entity, defined by systems of power that grant certain bodies more autonomy than others (Alfaro 2008-2010). Furthermore, contrary to Western conceptions of body and soul, the two are not separate from, but intimately intertwined with one another (Alfaro 2008-2010). Thus, the body is inseparable from internal and external worlds that seek to define it. To decolonize oneself or to decolonize the system cannot be achieved without decolonizing the body (Alfaro 2008-2010). From a feminist viewpoint, this involves politicizing what is normally relegated to the private sphere, publicizing the fact that the female body has sexual desire, that it cannot be domesticated as patriarchal powers try to assert (Alfaro 2008-2010). Our individual bodies are metaphors for larger bodies, and other borders between worlds.
Mujeres Creando Comunidad applies this concept to the borders between different identities, between nations, between public and private spheres, between past, present, and future. Paredes asserts that our skin has been made into a border by patriarchal and capitalistic systems which try to compartmentalize people into individual consumers. In reality, though, our skin is the point of sensory contact with the world, the membrane through which we are able to connect our inner worlds with those that surround us (Paredes 2011). The body, then, is central to the work of Mujeres Creando Comunidad. It is what enables them to forge connections between people and to dismantle institutionally enforced borders. When we are able to recognize the fact that we are not individuals, but rather part of a larger web of human society, plants, animals, sunlight, etc, we are able to envision a different form of community. Nations are imaginary constructs, Paredes points out, institutionally created borders that are used by the dominant classes to control people (Paredes 2011). The Andean concept of ayllu, on the other hand, is based upon the idea that individuals are not actually individuals, but part of a larger web of relations, it is a social organization that situates people in a collective relationship with one another and with the world around them (Alfaro 2008-2010). Paredes articulates this as a “community of communities” (Paredes 2011).
With the body as center, Mujeres Creando Comunidad is able to physically situate itself within indigenous understandings of the world. The body exists at the border between “el Arriba (Alax Pacha),” the aerial, celestial space; “el Aqui (Aka Pacha),” the place of reflection and the physical spaces our bodies navigate; and “el Abajo (Manqha Pacha),” where all resources come from and return to. These three dimensions are what situate the body in its political, geographic, historical, cultural, and epistemological contexts (Alfaro 2008-2011). Additionally, Mujeres Creando Comunidad situates the body in a cyclical rather than a linear concept of time in which past, present, and future are relegated to their own dimensions. In situating the body in a cyclical concept of time, Mujeres Creando Comunidad blur the border between past and present, allowing for the histories in which their bodies are entangled to guide the way they shape and play with the present. This is key to the process of decolonization, as it brings pre-Columbian histories into the fore of the present fight against systems of oppression (Alfaro 2008-2011). It also allows for Mujeres Creando Comunidad to reimagine and resituate the feminine body, exhuming past knowledges of female power in order to change the present (Alfaro 2008-2010).
The photo above is a still from Paredes’ (non)performance “Hilando findo desde el feminismo comunitario” and was retrieved from http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/modules/item/2274-mujeres-comunidad-feminismo
Mujeres creando y mujeres creando comunidad 
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