Ferida Sábia

These bodies build their freedom: a (feminist) interpretation to Ferida Sábia

For centuries, women have remained condemned to their biological destiny. Repeated androcentric values – many times openly misogynous – crystallised a “difference” where the feminine, always in the condition of the opposite side, inferior and peripheric, remained determined by deviations inscripted in its bodily surface. How could this supposed weakness not lead to dependency? How could this proheminent sensitivity not lead to unreasoning, even madness? How could reproduction, as inevitable destiny, not entice confinement disguised as care?
This is how the idea was built, bringing women closer to nature – wild, puzzling and dangerous – determined as men’s duty the exertion of domination: in a supposed “war of sexes”, men had the civilizatory task to handle.

To tame women, to control them, keep them under firm rein: this is how the violence over female bodies that was (and still is) perpetrated countless times was validated; a violence both physical and symbolic. How could he not cover her, who – lustful and subject to an unstable nature – could attract the man to the shadow of her dark breast? Over the whore’s skin, the saint’s mantle was thrown, veiling her, supposedly to her own sake. Casted away from public space and from power, condemned to the undergrounds, an image was coined to woman as damned, femme fatale, avatar of every damnation. However, there is no power without resistance; and over the centuries, the silenced ones started to make themselves heard – with screams that would echo louder every day.

Because it’s necessary to take into account that the starting point here is the body – or, to say it in a more specific way: a corporal state, meshed into a net of significations where the multiple shapes set it up; that, in different cultures, it has been associated to the “feminine essence” as spontaneous manifestation of its proximity to the untamed “nature”; that on this basis served to the patriarchal order to assure the “impurity” of women, her damned condition as someone (or something) to keep distant based on their sinister and annoying aspects. Nightgowns, undergarments and underskirts operate as indexes of this conceived femininity based on the biological dimension, that insists in putting the blood eclosion as an evidence – a sign, for its part, androcentrically associated to violence, as a manifestation of a natural state where the borders between woman and beast is graded (“Ferida Sábia”: night gowns held by bull’s bones), or sees the woman as a mere manifestation of her natural cycle (“Ferida Sábia”: association nightgown ~ cherry trees ~ period blood).

On the other hand, what does Ana Vitoria dare to do when registering and exposing her period blood, but to denounce the biological instance to what women is reduced by essentialist speeches, simultaneously violating the rules that makes the period blood an object of shame – something to be hidden by principles that, using “hygiene” as a subterfuge, create a group of practices and artefacts destined to confine in private spaces everything that violates the aesthetics from masculine spaces? That’s where the set of items gathered by Ana Vitoria takes us – basins, second skins – shaping the place where everything that shelters, protects or symbolizes this body converges. A body damned, by the patriarchy, to never get dissociated from the biological referent to what it’s allegedly reduced.

This collection of objects, placed in the installation space, is an exterior reflex of a materialization of femininity that is also inscribed in the body, where it erupts as a repertory of gests mobilized by Ana Vitória in her choreographic structure. The prison where patriarchy shaped the feminine body is turned into a wreck when it conquers its own freedom. The sewing practice – that is so intrinsically associated to women and at other times served as initiatic rite to girls when they got their first period – reveals itself as another metaphor: in “Ferida Sábia”, the bodies in conviviality are dedicated precisely to unwind the threads that have entangled them before, thus alluding to the emancipatory feminist process; not by chance, this is the beginning of the coreography, which developement will mirror a progressive liberation. Stuck in the beginning to ritualized movements, the bodies break their shackles of tradition through dance; and conquer, simultaneously, the right to a voice – that, at first, is reduced to lines that were crystalized by centuries of oppression, and afterwards shows its singularity, precisely where the sexist dispositives have put only instances of an unchangeable “feminin” condition.

Therefore, this is what Ana Vitória makes: denounce those traditional structures that have built women’s bodies and destinies and reclaim a new order, patriarchy threatening, where women are allowed to build new meanings to their own bodies; a new order where these are places of experience, not oppression. All of this is Feminist for sure, and it all also points to a Transfeminism to the extend that it gives the basis to the body to materialize its own gender expression, in a way that women can freely build their feminility. “Ferida Sábia”: not a “feminine” art, but a feminist art – and thus audacious and liberating.

Henrique Marques-Samyn