Internal Landscapes

Because the burdens of the COVID-19 pandemic are disproportionately borne by women, the reset of equality by returning to traditional gender roles has happened, I decided to make women the focus of my photographic effort. I invited them to use their bodies to annex the interiors of future homes, units still under construction or development. I documented the process of the body’s transition from bondage by homemaking practice to liberated movement.

“Freedom will never be given; it will always have to be won” - Simone de Beauvoir

The body is often a target for a variety of social pressures. Entire ideologies of domination can be reinforced, by coding them into relevant somatic norms, which, recast as bodily practices, often elude critical recognition. Freedom will forever be outside our reach if we do not make our bodies into allies, if we fail to learn how to use them better. That, however, would also require extricating ourselves from those harmful bodily practices that social structures have imposed upon us.

Through their bodily, physical presence, through their movements, the women negotiate both their own role within the space as well as the role of the space itself. In the process, they repeat gestures that remain embedded in our bodies albeit mostly outside conscious action. They attempt to domesticate the space, to make the house a home. The women negotiate the manner of situating their bodies in a space devoid of any furniture or appliances. By performing gestures traditionally associated with female gender roles, women expose their mechanical, automatic nature. Stripped of any and all decoration, backdrops and the homemaking instruments (eg. a broom or an iron), the gestures transcend their status of symbols of bondage and become a specific choreography of the body. Intentionality becomes improvisation, and pre-planned gestures are repeated so many times as to become wholly new liberating motions.