In the Cambridge English Dictionary, History is defined as:

1. History noun (PAST EVENTS) The study of or a record of) past events considered together, especially events of a particularperiod, country, or subject.

2. Informal something that happened or ended a long time ago and is not important now, or a person who is not important now, although they were in the past.

3. History noun (PARTICULAR RECORD) something that has been done or experienced by a particular person or thing repeatedly over a long period.

4. Idiom make history (Definition of history from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press) 

   We know that history starts when writing starts, and we have several branches of knowledge such as archaeologists, historians and astrologists that give us paint strokes of an unknown and mysterious past.  However, we really do not know what of written history is truth or lie, fabrication or discernment; it is not an addition of hard data, accessible and clear, history is the embellished or satanized memory of a few, fixed photograms of fluid events.  Sparkles of truths, anecdotes, gossip, inventions, arrangements that are useful in the understanding of our present, to demerit or exalt a person, group, idea or philosophy… Rarely will be encounter a real recount of what happened when we weren’t there.  As a small exercise on the fallibility of story telling, we can chat with the person whom we had breakfast with and re-tell, carefully and minutely that which happened in said breakfast, and we will see important discrepancies, half memories, something in which our partner in crime focused and we didn’t… anyway… history is a path made with blows of memories and evidence which interpretation is subjective, sayings, hearsay, writings, drawings and speculation. But also, it is a path manipulated to serve the interests of the moment in which it is written and re-written… A narrative that will adjust to the social parameters of the time and the needs of the victors, the powerful, and sometimes, the frightened one.

   It is here, in the XXI Century, in the posthumanism, where we start discovering that history up to now is told with half-truths, hidden lies, changes that were convenient for those who wrote or those who paid.  In humanism (S XIV) (Raffino, 2020)[1] man became the centre of the narrative… Not any man, white catholic of protestant occidental male.  Man as the gravitational centre of all stories, of all heroisms, advancements, achievements. Man with the tangential presence of a woman or some character of the original people… I have several examples:

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   ¿Who was the first person to climb the Everest? Edmund Hillary, and after many years of silence the Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay presence was included, in a possible prior arrival, and I quote “… The 7th of June of 1924, Mallory and Irvine and 4 sherpas, had arrived to the VI Camp at 8230m.” 4 sherpas, men, possibly Nepalese, whose names do History has forgotten… They are not white men.

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   Another example, the first person to ever make fiction films was a woman, Alice Guy, who, for years, made two short films per week.  Another such example, we have all seen the film “Hidden Figures”, about the women who made the launching of the first ever space trip possible. Engineers with privileged minds, who despite discrimination they arrived on time to be part of the historical and technological event of world magnitude, nevertheless, for years, nobody knew of their participation and nobody cared, their names: Frances Northcutt, Margaret Hamilton, Katherine Johnson and JoAnn Hardin Morgan, they were not only women, but black women so doubly discriminated.  I can not forget to mention the other group of forgotten people, homosexuals, women and men alike, like Alan Turing, who discovered the Enigma Code, (with a team of women, by the way), and who died ignominiously, regardless having taken one of the most important steps to end WW2.  And like these, I could have enough examples to knit an exquisite and beautiful rug, with a colourful and asymmetric beauty, uncomfortable and illustrative.

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   In the universe of fictions that is Art History, there are many omissions that time has not been able to bury in their entirety, and that thanks to recent investigations, the search of alternative narratives and the survival of factual evidence, we have stories that jump out from the standard and that show us voices and paint strokes, visual poetry, sculptures, philosophy, that have moulded the world we live in and that we did not know they were women who broke the glass ceiling of their world… The time to honour those omissions is now, and it is here where I want to add my grain of salt in this banquet of forgotten and unearthed knowledge.  I am not a historian, I am an artist and I want to take from the investigations and the revaluated stories and tell you about the life and work of 16 women that changed the course of art history, that taught and open roads.  Women that were part of the most significant artistic movements and that, thanks to their input, art, culture and everyday happenings have been enriched.  Women that lived in the margin of social norms, that dared to live under the codes of their own philosophy.  Women that fought in order to be able to paint, sculpt, write and question society and its ways.  In 16 articles, I will tell you about them and us.  About the lives that, even from the shadows, have inspired us and who we descend from as artists. We are their descendants in crooked lines, indirectly, sinous and dusty paths, leaving on our DNA, the non-erasable imprints of their visions, their strokes and their love for art.

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   Each period and each place have their own way of reading history.  Today we are in a period in the west called “posthumanism”. Each artistic and philosophical period is brought on in reaction to the one before.  So, from modernism we have postmodernism and from reform, counter reform; it is thus, how post-humanism opposes humanism, where the main premise was that Man was at the centre of everything, an anthropocentric idea, man as creator and main character of history, taking unseating God.  It is from post-humanism from where we, today, look at history.

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   Post-humanism looks at humans from their creed, nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, race, dis/ability etc.  There is no more centre, there are several points of view and not just the Eurocentric one that has been predominant up to now.  It is now when the “other” brings their voice to the narrative, our discourse, our perspective.  Today we have gender studies, race studies, nationality studies… re-interpretations of history and philosophies that question the official narrative and the past, the deconstruction was one of the movements that invite us to question, to take every phrase and every word and look for the signifier in the significant. (Ayala Aragón, 2013).