Reivindicación (Reclaiming) brings together proposals that reflect on the human condition and its relationship with the environment through the body. It is a space for peers to connect, listen to one another, share their research, and link social organizations, communities, artists, self-taught individuals, neighbors, and ancestral knowledge in a horizontal encounter of human beings who can discern the meaning of Reivindicación in these times, from diverse contexts, geographical locations, and perspectives. In this case, Reivindicación is the conceptual framework of the 9th PerfoARTnet International Performance Biennial, giving voice to people from Colombia, Mexico, the United States, Serbia, Togo, Puerto Rico, Catalonia, Germany, Argentina, Spain, China, Ireland, and Romania. This means reclaiming from different regions, recognizing this invisible network that transcends borders, and how a rhizome of thought and feeling is constructed from diversity. PerfoArtNet continues to believe that body art can contribute to actions that seek to heal, repair, question, reflect, resist, critique, point out, forgive, transform, demand, reconcile, dignify, resignify, build, deconstruct, awaken, liberate, and imagine other realities. We cannot stop dreaming, we cannot stop believing, we cannot stop feeling, we cannot stop being silent, especially in times when reality seems rather unreal, and when the individual and social body are exposed. It is inevitable that what happens around us will make us shout or react, often with words and sometimes with actions that seek to point the way and give us a light on the path. Here, bodies are the means that speak for that social body, interlocutors of communities, mediators of a society silenced by oppression. They point to what affects us all and everything; they are overwhelmed by the current situation and try to unleash micro-protests that can create civic awareness and social commitment. Ephemeral actions aimed at strengthening empowerment, trust, respect, solidarity, collective work, and the common good. Proposals conscious of the past and present that desire a different future, a different way of living together, and therefore choose to speak of life, from life, and for life. Speaking from the heart and from personal experiences in the midst of a society that seeks to homogenize individuals and relationships is an act of resistance to biopower or control over bodies.

The act of reclaiming invites us to remember, not to forget, to resist, to reclaim, to demand, to rescue, to protest, to fight, and to forgive; several lines that intersect, deterritorialize, mix, connect, and exchange, generating horizontal communities that reconfigure, reorganize, and resignify individuals and societies on a map of cultural, political, social, and human exchange, like a rhizome that connects horizontally with others, storing nutrients and reproducing, like all living beings. To summon, to seek, to delve into, and to find sensitive beings who use their bodies to reflect allows us to discover how we, as individuals and as a society, reclaim ourselves through the relationship between body, life, and community. Do we ask ourselves how to find a body without organs? A body that questions its position, that inquires about the context, that reconfigures itself, and we find ourselves confronted with the vindication of historical and collective memory, of the body, of silenced voices, of identity, of gender and dissent, of the land, of the ancestral and the human, of our rights, of love for others and for ourselves, of social and internal struggles. We find interconnection among sentient beings, who, gathered horizontally, can dialogue, share experiences, bodily and molecular struggles; this leads us to think of rhizomatic structures, like networks woven between beings, like neural maps, biological systems, or roots that, although distant, unite in art, the body, thought, the collective, and feeling; therefore, we propose a rhizomatic environment where everything is interconnected, because everything that affects the physical is energetically connected to the sentimental, the emotional, the spiritual, and the environment. Therefore, the connections between the individual, social, cultural, and political body are explored under the concept of vindication, peaceful action, and social reflection. Each rhizome is a living node, an independent being, composed of many plateaus, like independent cells that, together with others, form a being, a species, a community. "Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entrances; in this sense, the burrow is an animal rhizome that sometimes presents a clear distinction between the line of flight as a passageway for movement, and the layers of reserve or habitat (cf. the muskrat). Contrary to tracing, which always returns to the same thing, a map has multiple entrances. A map is a matter of performance."

When we ask, "What would you assert yourself for today? What is that necessary pause to stop and think?"... we find how each person manifests themselves in one way or another with their body, words, gaze, and from their very core they express what they feel and their reactions to what affects us... Body in Crisis, Ring A Ring A, Sacred Communion, Shores of Memory, Don't Stop Talking, This Is How I Walk, Gala Songs, After the Party, Contain, 40 Remains, Dance for Life, What Bodies Feed the History We Silence, She Is She, Protected Bodies, Restricted Identity, Breathe, Berlin Wall, Dry Rain, You Only Loved Me, Play It, Nothingness and the Sea, Journey Within Oneself, Offering, Overcome Depression, What Weighs on You? Reconfigurations, Oh Unchewable Glory, Balancing the Rope, Nothing Tastes as Good as Feeling Thin, The Combustion of South America, Panoptic Fence, Mismatch, A Woman's Trembling Vowels or Writings; are titles that speak about: race, gender, human rights, environment, memory, child abuse, life, resistance, decoloniality, power, food sovereignty, gender violence, ritual, human relations, healing, women's rights among other personal, social, community and global claims.

"The puppet's strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, do not refer to the supposed will of the artist or puppeteer, but to the multiplicity of nerve fibers that in turn form another puppet."* "A rhizome would never cease to connect semiotic links, power structures, and circumstances related to the arts, sciences, and social struggles."* General characteristics of the rhizome or principles* 1. Connection 2. Heterogeneity 3. Multiplicity 4. Non-signifying rupture 5. Cartography 6. Decal

"There is nothing more beautiful, more loving, more political than subterranean stems and aerial roots, adventitious growth and rhizome."*

*Mil Mesetas – Deleuze y Guattari