Woman Go No’Gree

Gloria Oyarzabal

28 sep – 02 nov 2024
IPCI — Instituto de Produção Cultural e Imagem

  • Exhibitions
  • EI Archive
  • Porto

Curador: Vítor Nieves

The re-exhibition of Gloria Oyarzabal’s work could not be missing from these “Legacies of Colonialism.” Winner of the Discovery Awards in 2018, her presence during that memorable inaugural journey left an indelible mark on the edition. In a year when the festival reflected on the concepts of “Beauty and Consolation,” and in a context where colonialism was not yet a widely discussed theme, Oyarzabal emerged with great impact, bringing us a narrative and images that are impossible to forget. Her work, powerful and provocative, challenged conventions and shed light on urgent issues that had often been overlooked until then.

Woman Go No’Gree

Empires, by their very nature, embody and institutionalize difference, both between metropolis/colony and between colonial subjects. Imperial imaginary floods popular culture.

Gender categories were one kind of bio-logic “new tradition” that European colonialism institutionalized in many African cultures. Infantilization of women as part of Western patriarchal system was also exported with the colonization of the mind, subtle and alienating practice that, in many cases, those who execute it in the various intangible planes of daily life do so in the name of morality, of values, customs proclaimed with the trick of deception.

Issues as class, race, age, gender — all of them social constructs for the exercise of power —, even health, should be taken into account as being fundamental to the female experience.

Beauty circulates as a form of commodity with social, economic and cultural value. However, these norms are often measured with Eurocentric values, with white beauty narratives (thinness, youth, and whiteness) and ideals of beauty being strongly racialized. Whiteness is reinforced at the same time as the norm, while ‘otherness’ becomes fetish and something ‘exotic’. The three central concepts that have been the pillars of Western feminism — women, gender and sisterhood — are only understood with a careful attention to the patriarchal nuclear family from which they have emerged, familiar form that is far from being universal.

Erotic, sexuality, sisterhood, motherhood, marriage, tradition, domestication, inclusivity of men… all these aspects with its own lights and shades in each society should come out in the same level in order to compare. Maybe understanding History, we will be able to overcome the social and symbolic ascription only by differences which invite hierarchical classification, and open the range to other factors for the construction of identity.

Many racialized feminists believe that mainstream feminism has acted as invisible ballast on their backs, showing itself traditionally paternalistic and exclusive with other realities that don’t fit Western model, adopting it as a universal mantra, and setting an agenda that doesn’t correspond to the concerns of the non-white world and speaking for the rest of the women of the planet. A conversation around decolonizing feminism is proposed, questioning the Eurocentric rational theoretical frameworks that construct gender categories in a universalistic manner.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about “The Danger of the Single Story”. Let us wish for new ways of relating genders, of new models of intercultural dialogues not based on supremacy nor on an excluding hierarchy, and maybe identities, both individual and community, could naturally develop towards a society which one wouldn’t have to be invisible in order to advance.

Gloria Oyarzabal

IPCI — Instituto de Produção Cultural e Imagem, Lda
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