Presented in:
Antwerp,
30th of November 2017
in “Stories, Art and Extensions in Antwerp 2060”. Organized by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Antwerp. Permeke library.
Porto,
Festival Feminista do Porto
From 15th to 28th of February 2018- Actions in different public spaces of the city.
From 1st 30th of March 2018 – Collective exhibition.
THE BEASTS ARE OUT IN THE CITY.
HIRSUT WOMEN READY TO BREAK THE RULES OF BODY POLICING
FOLLOWING RITUALS OF SELF-LOVE
Doing an analysis of the different disciplines and exercises of cultural control exercised through the hair, we can observe how in different cultures female hair is linked to male desire, as an erotic element that has to be domesticated following ideas of purity and fidelity, which traditionally have been subjecting the woman’s body and her own autonomy.
These disciplines and norms acquire a strong social character when bodies enter into circulation in public space, playing a decisive role in the construction of cultural identities.
A series of “protheses” made of leather and human and synthetic hair, designed for body parts where as a woman is not culturally accepted having hair , are activated by a group of women making self-love rituals in the public space. The Beasts, hairy women show the unstable borders between our subjectivity and what we consider “the other”, destabilising the different forms of control exercised over bodies and generating encounters with otherness through the breakdown of the binaries.
