The other day, in one of those occasional friflannigans through the internal black hole, I came across a cover of the 1980s cosmopolitan women’s magazine.
It was there, adorning the figure of a mine in a lilac cavadón swimsuit and a tuft of picapau: “TV stars learn their secrets to keep themselves beautiful and lean.”
E: “The ideal female form – how do you compare? (see our table to find out) ”.
For all the goddesses! A. Shape.Ideal.Feminine.
Thank you my God that we are in 2021, the year when we can be free to be what we want.
Or not?
Over the past year, the long confinement that we have been through and, therefore, our corpiños, has undoubtedly fueled human fury to see and be seen on the internet. To feel better. We were / were at home with boats (or suitcases) with astronomical levels of anxiety even. Alone. Needy. Concerned. Let’s scroll a little image to forget the news. Nenon?
Over the months, tik tokers (tik tok, that star lockdown thing) have invaded and social media influencers posing with filters and pouting pussies and asses, sometimes throwing in a loungewear or a bowl of salad. in the composition and subtitling with something: “Natural”, “take care of ourselves”, “be happy”, that bullshit.
Natural my ass, and with a lot of cellulite.
The altered pseudo-spontaneous world of networks can of course lead citizens to compare themselves. Turn the voyeur into an instagram model. Or, in a row, smell the bandit’s horse shit so you don’t have 1,804,791 followers and 1,074,701,804,189 likes or Kardashian’s ass.
For this reason, the Anatomy of Confinement project, by Barcelona photographer Andrea Ruiz, caught my attention.
Throughout 2020, Ruiz has collected self-portraits of 61 women. Performed in different houses between France, Argentina and Spain, they collect bodies, most of them naked; whole or fragmented. Sincere.
The action brings the reaction: it is one of the artistic manifestations that THANKS TO LAS DIOSAS has emerged to counter the elegiac current of PadrãoDeBeleza and the objectification of the female body. Another project that I love, from a mother and daughter duo, in the vein of quesef *** vamosernóisaindaquecusteumaslágrimas: @stylelikeu. Etc.
In the photos collected by Ruiz, there is no retouching, there is no manipulation more than the desire of the individual to show himself without strings, without molds or prefabricated poses, without fear of being this. that it is, without the intermediation of another look. With streaks, hair, “Michelines” (Spanish slang for Pneuzinho), scars, nothing of the shrunken belly. Hey, hard thing not to judge, right?
“I have always had the anguish of showing what we do not see, what we hide or that society makes impossible”, explains the photographer, who also maintains an Instagram account, @mespapaia, dedicated to “sharing information on self-managed gynecology, conscious menstruation, feminist activism and related topics ”.
“During quarantine it was clear that I had to do something with all these negative body messages that came down to us women – keep your shape in quarantine, stay ‘fine’ when detention is over, etc.” , he exemplifies.
From there, she proposed the project on the networks and many volunteers began to arrive.
The photos are all faceless and anonymous. Not only to depersonalize the characters and facilitate their participation; also so that “any woman can identify with the bodies and people she sees in the images,” says Ruiz.
I like to think about the feelings embedded in the pictures. In these I see love and acceptance. Let’s go.
The collection can be viewed on the artist’s website and, until the end of March, at the Espai Jove Casa Sagnier, in Barcelona.