PANTINGO

Wish I was a wall

“I wish you were this wall”, seems to say the woman as she rubs herself sensually against a neatly whitewashed wall, bricks that could be from any alley in any big city and stuccoes that have been expertly aged to give a touch of boho-chic. That wall, like the timeless backgrounds of Byzantine icons, is flat, giving minimal context, so that the only object that matters stands out, the only one you have to look at, the only one you need to desire. Nothing can distract you from a mouth, breasts, or ass. It has been the perfect and most successful iconographic type in our visual culture for centuries. But now she is no longer an all-powerful two-dimensional divinity but the woman who challenges you, who seduces you. The wall is now a vertical bed to toss and turn on, where she is anxiously awaiting the viewer to possess her. But perhaps none of these women want to please that wall, even though all that dancing seems to indicate the opposite. This bed of stone has become their prison, where they are put on display, where they can easily be cornered, hunted like game, raped, and from which there is no escape. By re-watching their routines over and over again we start seeing the absurdity of this mise en scène. The origin of this idea lies in the heteropatriarchal gaze but by becoming aware of this we can create a new, antagonistically critical, free, feminist reading. By saying “I wish I was this wall” women can take back control, creating a new type of wall against which the woman is free to do as she pleases, where she has complete power over her own image, and maybe even to disappear like in the photographs of Francesca Woodman, where games of hide and seek become symbolical doorways to eternity and/or anonymity.

Text by Mery Sànchez and Valentina Coppo