Swap Meet: Female Representation

“Could you do for me with your hands…?”

The drawings on the stickers are the visual result of a research on female representation through a survey made on the streets of Rotterdam, where several people were asked to do, using their hands, a symbol of the vagina.

These stickers are only to be pasted and experienced on public toilets. By doing so they become public but at the same time refer to the privacy with which we deal with our own genitalia, the individual vision of the collection, and also to be experienced on a single basis.

Carla,

Great to see the stickers on the site. Post more! One of the interesting things about that sticker project was that there was no singular image representing the vagina. In the end you made a kind of portrait of gestures circumscribing the form.

We are also considering bringing our Geuzennaam* T-shirts to the Swap Meet so your stickers will have some company in relation to the topic of female representation.

*Geuzennaam: a Dutch term for a negative or derogatory name appropriated and reclaimed as a positive label of empowerment.

1/250 negative names to call a woman (and the inventory is still growing)

*one more time in Dutch... Geuzennaam: zelfgekozen erenaam die oorspronkelijk als scheld- of spotnaam werd gebruikt.

for more info see Easy Iron on Geuzennaam on our DIY Page

Searching for two images to post in the Body-as-billboard-section, one recent (very pregnant Femke Halsema* in white T-shirt reading: Baas in Eigen Buik) and one from the 60's (very pregnant Dolle Mina lifting up her shirt to reveal the same text written on her belly) I found none of the above, but did come across this recent work by Willem Velthoven:

"I had an Abortion is an installation consisting of vests on wire coat-hangers which bear the text I had an abortion in all European languages. They symbolise the abundance of abortions and the shame connected with abortion, legal or illegal. In addition to these undergarments, in the autumn a line of cheerful T-shirts will be brought out, which openly present the same text. The wire coat-hanger (not the knitting needle), is the most frequently used - and very dangerous - instrument for the inducement of an improvised abortion."

I wondered how this kind of work functions in relation to "empowering women to make conscious, well informed decisions about family planning", which is the mission of Women on Waves, initiators of the show. Or is all fair in love and war?

*leader of the Dutch Green Party, using the pro-abortion classic "Baas in Eigen Buik" (master of our own belly) protesting the fact that the Dutch government is planning to cut birthcontrol pills from general health insurance.

After seeing the Women on the Waves T-shirts, I was reminded of Barbara Kruger's classic image: Your body is a battleground. Circulated on the surface of postcards, T-shirts and flyers, this one below was modified for a pro-choice rally in 1989.

(my apologies for the large scale of the image...if it goes smaller you can't read the text)

Femke, I agree with your unease with the slogan "I had an abortion". While I support Women on the Waves and understand the slogan as a way of dealing with shame or as a means of bringing abortion "out of the closet" so to speak, what I miss is the idea of choice... and this is THE point of women's reproductive rights. I even wonder if it would have been a good idea to place the words "and the choice was mine...." somewhere on the shirt.

I will also take the t-shirts I have made together with my feminist group of artistic intervention: ZOiNA. These t-shirts present different ways of depicting women and the female body by reworking, altering and questioning images from fashion magazines, the result is then printed on the t-shirts by using the technique of stencil graffiti.

Deborah Kelly comments on Baas in Eigen Buik: A Pro-choice classic with:

YOUR BODY IS ALSO A PLAYGROUND is the name of a gorgeous poster/postcard/online graphic that responds to and takes off from the famous Kruger piece.
It was made by the very prolific US-based artists who go by the name of Protest Graphics, and you can see some of their giant body of work at:
www.agitart.org

I am also bringing stencils related to female representation and will be making them on the spot. My idea is to give kind of "how-to" lessons and exchange stencils with others.

The idea is that I can stencil my city with your stencils and you can stencil your city with mine.

Last year Zoina did a project called Urban Body in Linz in collaboration with Transpublic, an artist run space. We graffittied and stenciled areas around beauty centers, sex shops, and clothing shops with images of or text of women taken from magazines.

action in front of a military shop:

action on the main shopping street of Linz:

Walking in the streets thinking of you and your project, I remember to send this link and pictures to your blog. "A room of one's own" is a project of a young feminist group of artists based mainly in Austria. A part of the project was to make visible feminist statements and questions by printing them on skirts which could become banners, if needed. More thoughts later, still walking....

This month you'll find the above image in large format on the streets of Amsterdam. The Amsterdam City Council is using the poster in a campaign that is meant to stimulate its inhabitants to discuss 'diversity in the city'.
Surprisingly enough, although many responses are being posted on the accompanying web forum www.amsterdamleeftsamen.nl none addresses the to our minds paternalistic and racist character of this campaign.

How about this story in terms of "our image is our own". Two young girls on trial in France for wearing the hijab to school.

It all started September 25, 2003

here's a few exerpts about their story taken from the Guardian:

Teenage sisters Alma and Lila were sent home from their lycee yesterday morning as punishment for breaking a nationwide ban on all displays of religious faith in the schoolroom.

"We are being asked to decide between our religion and our education; we want both," Alma Levy, 16, told local media, after the school decided to exclude her and her sister from classes for two weeks.

Current legislation permits the wearing of headscarves in schools if it is not "aggressive or proselytising", but individual schools are left to decide how this should be enforced.

Earlier attempts to compromise on how the sisters wear their headscarves have failed - despite their readiness to wear coloured and patterned scarves (deemed less aggressive by the school). "We are being asked to wear a veil that lets our earlobes show, and that reveals our hair and our necks," said Alma, whose mother is Muslim and whose father is an atheist Jew. "We don't agree with this."

Many of their schoolfriends are sympathetic. "Why stop them from demonstrating their religion? Nobody says anything to people who come dressed in gothic outfits wearing Satan T-shirts," one adolescent said.

for the full story go to:
The Guardian online

On Friday in France, the two young girls, Alma and Lila, lost their court battle for the right to wear a hijab in school. It seems wearing the hijab violates the separation of religion and state (and public schools being an extension of the state etc...etc....). On hearing this, it made me wonder if they were also going to be expelling young girls from school for wearing little gold crosses around their neck (my conclusion is... highly unlikely. It seems like the only sanctioned religion allowed in French schools these days is capitalism.

So the moral of the story....
While in France you may get away with wearing this to school:

and you can also wear this without any hassle:

you are forbidden to wear this:

What's going on here? Its clear that the hijab exposes an anxiety. The dominate symbolic order feels itself under attack from within. And it also shows that some religious identities are so given, so much a part of the very fabric of a society, that they are practically invisible. (gold crosses will not be yanked from the necks of little christian school girls) The BIG MESSAGE is: "you must look like us". Integration and assimilation become a means for quite literally stripping girls of their chosen identity.

Hearing about Alma and Lila's ordeal brought me back to the campaign circulated in Amsterdam. The poster is a symptom of the kind of xenophobic virus currently spreading across the EU and other countries. What does it mean when debate around Muslim women is framed so polemically as "power girl or problem case".

Also, what does it mean when the Amsterdam city government asks at the bottom of the image "What can we do to emancipate Muslim women?".

The very question works off a series of assumptions which can only be seen as prejudice. First of all, who is the collective "we". Are not Muslim women a part of the collective we? Are they not a part of the social fabric of Amsterdam? Or are "we" speaking solely of the "sanctioned-liberated-traditional-secular-or-Christian-Dutch kind of "we"? Secondly, this poster would have us believe that Muslims have a kind of monolithic identity, and that Islam is interpreted and practiced in a singular way. Its like saying Christians are all one thing...well yes they are, if you gloss over the differences of Catholics, Protestants, Fundamentalists etc.... Aside from the fact that Amsterdam is filled with Turkish Muslim women, Moroccan Muslim women etc... there are also differences within the Islamic faith, different understandings of what the practice of Islam means in their daily lives.

Finally, and perhaps most shockingly, the poster operates off the colonial premise that your enlightenment should look like our enlightenment, but today, enlightenment has been replaced with words like emancipation or liberation. Where under colonial rule the so-called "savage" was to be tamed to look like the Western image of civilization. Now, it is the image of Western emancipation or freedom that is being imposed upon others, in this case, the female immigrant practicing Islam (even when she may be a third or fourth generation inhabitant of the Netherlands...meaning, in the legal registry system, she is Dutch) Freedom is thus interpretated to mean "You are free to behave like we do, to look like we do". And in this sense the poster campaign in Amsterdam, is closely related to the court case recently lost by Alma and Lila in France.