SUN IN WINTER: A NEW DAWN IN TIME Rodolfo J. Lugo-Ferrer (Marian María Alvarez-Collins, Translator)                                                                                        "Somehow, the mystery of the incarnation is repeated                                                                                                            in each woman: every child who is born is                                                                                                                                  a god that becomes a man"                                                                                                                                         Simone de Beauvoir Commitment without political refrains, metal metaphors that support with the shout of equality and fairness, murmured in an immense silence with much roar in the cosmic conscience of the Sun of Winter, name of the group of Afghan women who fight to be respected, and to whom sculptor María Elena Perales retakes to tribute during the Woman's Week, to these courageous women of the upheaval in Central Asia. The sun is the time and the reborn, the winter is the other and the negation; the sun is the dawn, a new dawn without repression, without limitations. Sun of Winter, is not only the name of a group, that fights for respect and for dignity, it is, also, the commitment of Perales, that with these sculptures hoists a banner and gives a shout that becomes a song or a poem of optimism, so that someday the Afghan women can receive a pluralist education, so that day can walk without being accompanied and they can retake their jobs. Perales is committed with the replaying fight of the Afghan women, so they do not have to wear the chadri nor the burka, clothes that shuts them to invisibility. It is a fight against, not only of the physical and real hunger, but to the hunger for rights and vital spaces in time. As the suffix stán, of the Persian language, which means, place or land of, this tribute goes to assure that place, that space of freedom. In Afghanistan metals are found in the ten million mines that are buried underground; in this Perales' exhibition, metal is a shout, is a metaphor of rupture, by means of concrete and abstract circles, to announce a new dawn through orange pendulums, announcers of hope, good carriers of good news against clustering. Sun of Winter is a song of women's total freedom. As the French writer Simone de Beauvoir's epigraph, this tribute of Afghans women is extent to the thousands of sheltered Afghan children in Darrah, Pakistan, where, instead of being playing, they are working making bricks for more than twelve hours a day, having a quota of a thousand bricks for only a quarter of a dollar. Exhibition at The Caribe Hilton Hotel, Sponsor by PETRUS Galeros and Casa Protegida Julia de Burgos, 2002