information / gallery

An affair of women

by Jano Cortijo & Alice Vega

The later generations are the ideological and cultural product of the mass media. We know a lot more about Libertad Lamarque, Lady Diana or Camucha Negrete than about world, national or regional history.

The eagerness to progress and the consequent pursuit of the technology to achieve that implied that parents reduced their contact with their children to the minimum leaving their education to the ever imperfect educational system. Thus, television, radio, film and –to an extent- literature have been the fortuitous educators of millions of kids and teenagers around the world.

This simple equation easily explains the state of things. And it also explains in an equally simple way how our society has produced its ideas about women, what are the elements and mechanisms used to refer to them.

About the art of being a woman is an exhibition developed from the generalized premise that (everything associated to) gender issues are inevitably a dichotomy and stereotypical: femininity is sensitive and inscribed in the domestic realm; masculinity, strong and inscribed in the public realm.

To understand how this perception has been constructed in the social scheme we designed Ladies´room, a utilitarian space with media products that isolated and recontextualized in the exhibiting space are no longer just scenes from movies or television programs, books, songs or texts and become elements to be scrutinized as the components of our collective notion of women and femininity.

This sort of media concentrate, that included songs by Chabuca Granda and Madonna, scenes with Isabella Rossellini or Laura Bozzo, texts by Susan Sontag and Rocío Silva Santisteban, allowed us to notice how the image of the female has been elaborated, represented and reproduced in the mass media while at the same time emphasizing the almost tangible fact of how our indifferent daily consumption easily accumulates harmful clichés and stereotypes.

presentation text for the installation “Ladies’ room”
presented in the exhibition “About the art of being a woman”
Trujillo, 2002