your life, your tears, your laugh
This is an homage for you all
from every one of your children.
This is part of Yoko Ono’s exhibit that opened last month in MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires). The entire exhibit is interactive, and this section invites people to write notes to their mothers and put stickers on the wall.
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Meanwhile, “Arising/Resurgiendo” displays a wall of texts accompanied by photographs of the writers’ eyes. In this piece, Yoko Ono invites women to send in anonymous true testimonies about pain that they had suffered from being women. She writes, “Be courageous, be angry, we are all together.”
They grinded against me on the bus. They didn’t consider me for a promotion because I’m a woman. They groped me while I walked in the street. They showed me their penis in the doorway of my high school. A guy chased after me when I was 8. I was assaulted by a waiter in a restaurant, a taxi driver, the policeman on the corner of my work, the painter in the building that I live in. A guy forced me to kiss him in a club. 4 times I’ve been “invited” by strangers to get in their car while waiting for the bus. They judged me for the clothes I was wearing. They insisted on doing things to me that I didn’t want. They touched my ass yesterday in the subway.
They lowered my self-esteem, they filled me with fear and they restricted my freedom my whole life.
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Almost every day in the street people express their opinions about my body and the things that they would do to it.
(Photos: Prensa Malba https://www.flickr.com/photos/museomalba/with/27982830960)
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These experiences, though recounted by individuals, are ones that virtually every woman goes through on a constant basis. This “Iceberg of Gender-Based Violence” infographic illustrates that these invisible and subtle forms of violence pave the way for more explicit forms such as assault, rape, and murder. If all women are united in what we experience, we should all be united- women and men- in changing the narrative.
Both of Yoko Ono’s pieces recall our interview with Marcela Ojeda, the journalist who started the Ni Una Menos movement with a Tweet that she wrote in May of last year while covering a case of a 14-year-old girl named Chiara Paez, who was killed by her boyfriend. Ojeda’s Tweet read: “Actresses, politicians, artists, businesswomen, role models ... women, everyone, bah.. are we not going to raise our voice? THEY’RE KILLING US” In the interview, Ojeda said, “To think that last year, 275 women died- that is not just one woman- that woman was a daughter, a sister, a cousin, a student, a neighbor, a story, she was a mother.”
A woman is killed every 30 hours in Argentina. A recurring theme in these cases is that femicide victims appear in trash dumps. In Ojeda’s words, “the symbolism of a woman in a trash dump is that. That there are guys, men, delinquents, murderers, that believe that’s what women are. That the end for her, and the best spot for her to die, is in a trash dump.” These statistics won’t change if women continued to be viewed as just trash in the moment and numbers in retrospect. We have spoken with many artists, activists, and journalists who dedicate their lives towards the work of presenting each number as a story, as the multifaceted human being that she was. They inspire us, and we hope to spread the same message through our film.
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