Here I am

Subduing our bodies, in the sense of controlling our impulses and desires, is an aspiration which is older than Christianity. At that time, the dominant question was: how do you get good control over yourself? Christianity made women the symbol of possible loss of control over our bodies. Achieving our self-control turned into being able to control the woman, to avoid the temptation that she, malevolent, represents.

An artist's book that portrays the woman through female characters represented at different times in the history of theater, including Medea (Medea, Euripides, Greece, 431 BC) and Zulmira (The Deceased Woman, Nelson Rodrigues, Brazil, 1953). It is a female portrait of the role that women have played throughout history, through the eyes and speeches of other women and the artist herself in dialogue, with the performing arts and theater as a backdrop.

Two parts that complement each other

In the first part of the book, the names of the characters are not revealed, being identified only by Roman numerals. The use of light weight paper aims at creating a subtle transparency through which the characters merge, dialoguing with each other regardless of their identity and historical time. The intention here is to understand the figure of the woman beyond social or temporal labels.

In the second part of the book, the names of the characters represented are revealed in a numbered index, together with the corresponding information about the plays from which they were taken. Here the texts of the works are complete, excluding the other characters and leaving only the speech of the character in question. Thus, a new text is created in which the flow of reading provokes a different interpretation of the work in question.

The texts, organized in chronological order, are extracts from what is manifested in each character, which, in an almost magical way, creates a new text that borders on the unreal, but which perfectly allows one to appreciate the evolution of the language according to work after work. In the same way, it is noticed how women, even passing through different cultures and evolving over time, continue to receive a different, less privileged treatment, in which they are portrayed, most of the time, as hysterical, excessively dramatic, fragile or submissive.

This is a limited edition of 350 copies (230 Portuguese / 120 English)