Womanhood

Womanhood 2012 – 2023 Through meditative exercises on self representations and through compulsive mechanisms allowing a certain control over what’s suspended, this project aims to become a view on another womanhood.

A series of performances.

Depictions

of the female body

in symbolic red

and a plastic bust

taking place

of my perishable one.

A denial of beauty.

And in the end

what is it that judges me,

defines me?

Is it my gender?

This identity

that was born

from where you are born.

Is it my ability to feed you,

and the presence of death every month?

Or maybe the absence of it

making me unworthy

of the perpetuation of the species.

In the project Womanhood, this other language that we don’t yet speak, that we haven’t yet found in relation to our otherness, is researched. By using the photographic medium as its main narrative or main portal, this practice focuses on reinventing the ethics, poethics and canonical aesthetics of how the female body and psyche are represented; and along with them, the symbolic connotations that notions such as motherhood, affect, labour and power, have in the public discourse, amongst others.
For this project gut feelings, psychical or emotional pains and suspended states of being are coming to the surface. Suspended, because they ponder on questions such as: how can the difficulty in feeling the erotic pleasure can be uttered? What does it mean for the body to be resistant in giving birth? How much can the unseen, either consciously or through its physiology, affect our life decisions and perspectives? Through meditative exercises on self representations and through compulsive mechanisms allowing a certain control over what’s suspended, this project aims to become a view on another womanhood.

Womanhood has been also published as a photographic book by Meta Cosmology, based in Taiwan.

Danai Simou