Erotica
Exhibition My Body: Disputed Territory - Curated by Galciani Neves
Galeria Nara Roesler
São Paulo, Brazil
https://nararoesler.art/
Ceramics and steel
2023
@ Flávio Freire
It is necessary to put a stop to violence, to understand at the expense of which bodies patriarchy continues to reign and to be aware of what it tookto achieve a minimum potential for gender equality.
And more: it is necessary to maintain the vigilance of the conquered rights, because they must be fully in force and must not be threatened, altered, with each crisis that insinuates. Well, despite everything, in 2022, we celebrate 90 years of women's suffrage, guaranteed through the first BrazilianElectoral Code. The law was also enacted, which finally dispenses with intimate endorsement for the tubal ligation procedure.
According to the TSE survey, in the 2022 elections, there was, although not very expressive, an increase in the representation of women in theChamber, going from 77 to 9. And, despite the strong threats, the right to change the first name and gender directly in notary offices, one of themost important judicial achievements of transgender people in the country. Let's see: are these achievements or simply small, slow and delayedadvances in the debate agendas?
Obviously, more than data, these and many other silenced stories make the fight against injustice and violence against women urgent andrelentless, and in the verses also about a refusal (or social blindness) to recognize what is deals with violence and its omnipresence in intimate andhistorical spheres. By the way, who decides what can be considered violence against women? Who allows and authorizes extremist hatredsagainst women? How are predatory behaviors naturalized?
Faced with this tangle of events and doubts, it was necessary to follow a definition: “violence against women is any action or conduct, based ongender, that causes death, harm or physical, sexual or psychological suffering to women, both in the public and private spheres. No privacy". Readand understand this conception with gestures of insurgency. These are narratives in which the body is the protagonist, in which enjoyment, ancestry, spirituality and desire are also lexicons/practices of struggle, resistance and strength.
The visual researches of the participating artists make present a diverse woman I, in turmoil and that lights up from within. At the same time, theyare manifestations of a we that says about the world as a woman and with women.
The works are organized into three conceptual neighborhoods/axes: “Freedom is also a fight”, “Fabulating an experimental anatomy” and “Body-forest in slump”. In this meeting of artists, it is possible to perceive the woman's body as a territory where a myriad of scenes appear, sometimesecstatic, sometimes combative. And also how each body reacts, trying to heal itself, reforest itself, reappropriate itself. Reestablishing contours, reshaping them into a force of their own, generating sparks. Let's see the networks of pacts, knowledge and resistance that are woven betweenthese fables and their various urgencies. And may we also get involved in these networks, honoring all who came before us and paved the way, enjoying a time of healing, of letting go, in which there is no sacrifice of the ungovernable aspects of sexuality(ies). It's like Lorena Cabnal tells us: women in struggle need to be happy. Because the intention of machismo, racism, neoliberalism, and patriarchy is to see women in sad and sickbodies, because then there is no way to implement the struggles. May we break with the historical legacy of violence and with the body-landdichotomy, because as Cabnal also states: defending the body-territory and not defending the women's body-territory is a political inconsistency. And the recovery of a woman's body as a happy body cannot just be a territory of self-protection and in a self-centered condition, it has to be a recovery of the body-territory-land without communion. Thus, we break with machismo, emancipate the body and live in and as full territories.
Galciani Neves
Participating Artists: Anna Bella Geiger, Berna Reale, Brígida Baltar, Djanira, Daiara Tukano, Eneida Sanches, Fernanda Gassen, Flávia Vieira, Hariel Revignet, Isabella Beneduci, Josi, Laura Berbet, Letícia Parente, Lívia Aquino, Maré de Matos, Monica Ventura, Nazareth Pacheco, Renata Felinto, Regina Parra, Rubiane Maia, Sallisa Rosa, Sumé Vasconcellos, Tadaskia, Terroristas del Amor e Vania Medeiros.
