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After years of silence, repression, invisibility and censorship; years of unstoppable struggle, going out to the streets, claiming and raising our voices, the woman's body continues to be a political territory that is being conquered by several. Although it can be said that, little by little, physical and digital spaces are being gained, there is still a long way to go. 

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This campaign is carried out within the framework of the XII edition of the festival, where the focus is placed on women, their experiences and experiences in the patriarchal society in which they still find themselves, both as a character on the screen, as a person behind the camera occupying any position. This links to the sectionFOKUS: FREE THE IMAGE, where we give a screen to pleasure and desire, the sexuality and eroticism of women, the search for orgasm and to reconquer her body that has been covered up, objectified and fetishized for so long. 

TEAR DOWN THE TREE 

WITH FIRE OF ITS OWN WOOD

Just as punk used the images and hymns of the monarchy to break tradition from its own symbols,Maria Jose Garcia Piaggio, Lara Pillado MatheuYAlejandra Morote Peraltathey have taken some masculine visions of feminine sexuality to intervene in them and make them spring forth a look that shakes up commonplaces adopted by the patriarchy to interpret our bodies.

The most interesting thing about the gesture is that the fact of appropriating these images to subvert their assumptions from within is a way of telling the creators: you are the establishment too. That is why the gesture erodes, from the gender side, even certain aesthetic expressions applauded for their disruptive capacity.

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The establishment is the system of mutual protection generated by the members of a dominant group that defines, controls and sets the rules. And, in that sense, many visual artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, and even pornographers who believed themselves to be disruptive or avant-garde, on the issue of gender, have been (and are) the establishment. Polanski is the establishment. La Mataré de Loquillo is the establishment.

 

The videos and posters by García Piaggio, Pillado Matheu and Morote Peralta –created for the Al Este Film Festival—take fragments of images taken from pornographic photography to rewrite them in their own edition. One of the video pieces in this series superimposes, on the edited images, the rewriting of a cliché phrase:

 

A lady in the street, a lady in the house and a whore in bed.

 

One –in the street, one –in the house, one –in bed.

 

One, one, one.

 

They seem to be saying that founding new spaces is not enough, it is also necessary to correct the spaces where we are already present and that tell – they tell us – stories that contribute to the formation of identities. The predominantly male gaze in the cultural industries is the establishment that now has to be subverted.

 

And for that, you have to rewrite. Just as they did with pornographic photography, advertising posters, scripts, beauty criteria, festival selections, the balance of nudes, fashion parameters, critical texts, etc. can be rewritten.

 

Or use its fragments as firewood from a falling tree.

 

That rewriting or scribbling over it can be a provocation, a vindication or a mockery. Or it can be what we want... because that is the license of true creation, and that is what happens when women go from being just fictional characters imagined by men, to being authors inserted in a body of authors capable of generating interactions constants that sustain and support us – and not, as until very recently, peerless authors in a predominantly male creative world.

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Andrea Ortiz de Zevallos

Lima, May 2021

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