01 #BioRitme2019 :
Cards: After a period of deep connections, isolation might be needed to continue in the right direction.
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Después de situarme y ver qués y cuándos del programa, me di cuenta, harto contenta, de que NADA se me solapaba y podía ir a todo lo que me apetecía con CALMA.
Cogí una plaza de última hora en los talleres de @zinteta justo cuando ponían el cartel de que no quedaban plazas para el resto del festi y no podría haber tenido mejor primera experiencia.
Eramos un grupo variado, todes marcábamos nuestros límites sin reparo ni problema. Nos pintamos unes a otres como forma de cuidado. Después de esto, dejé de sentirme insegura estando desnuda.
Hay duchas mixtas, todas las piscinas y el pantano son bañador-opcional.
Hay carteles por todas partes sobre protocolos de acción en caso de agresión machista y con el número del punto lila.
Antes y después de cada concierto hacen recordatorios con trocitos de canciones que vienen al festival para recordar valores ecologistas y feministas.
Tribade fue el cierre de mi día y recordatorio de que no hay quien pare la revolución feminista.
Es una lástima que este festi sea la excepción a la norma, porque la organización es increíble.
Dora Maar was a very talented surrealist painter, photographer and poet.
Her work developed quickly from acute poetic street realism to Surrealist manipulations. She was particularly apt at making work out of her own hidden and dizzying emotional interior - as well as the desire to retreat from it.
Regretfully, she met Picasso, who repeatedly told her that “every photographer was merely a painter waiting to be released”, ignoring what Maar was actually bringing to the 20th century with her outstanding work.
Maar's earliest surviving photographs were taken in the early 1920s with a Rolleiflex camera. From that moment, she started working and collaborating with photographers such as Pierre Kéfer, Brassaï, Louis-Victor Emmanuel Sougez, Louis Chavance and frequented the October group, formed around Jacques Prévert and Max Morise after their break from surrealism. The influence surrealism had in her could be seen early on in her career. She was one of the signatures in André Breton’s tract "Appeal to the struggle". She was aware of what the political climate was and sided with the leftists, often depicting the realities of what the depression brought. She was part of a leftist association called “Masses,” where she first met Georges Bataille, an anti-fascist organization called "The Union of Intellectuals Against Fascism" and a radical collective of left-wing actors and writers called October.
Her work, as many other women before, was eclipsed by her relationship with one of the many abusive and harmful so-called geniuses, in her case it was Picasso. Upon her separation from Picasso, Maar experienced a nervous breakdown. In later life, she moved from Paris to rural Provence and painted mainly abstract landscapes and melancholy still lifes. Despite her achievements, following their destructive relationship, Maar lived partially in the shadow of Picasso's words; she never returned to photography, the medium through which her exquisite and unusual character shines so brightly.
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#illustration #ink #women #poet #photography #surrealism #doramaar #photographer #painter #womeninspiringwomen
Alfonsina Storni
[TW: Suicide]
Swiss-born Argentinian poet of the modernist period, in which she didn’t seem to fit.
She left her family and her native tongue when she was young to start a life in Buenos Aires. She wanted to be a woman and a writer and did not want to renounce to neither.
Advocate for women’s rights in Argentina, she was a working class, single teenage mom herself. There and then, she starts to write “para no morir” (to not die).
She was a key contributor to feminist poetry, it was one of her principal innovations as a poet but it came with a price. Men such as Jose Luis Borges and Eduardo Gonzalez Lanuza used their pull and influence to criticise her work harshly, blinded by their own bias as privileged men. They couldn’t take the directness in Storni’s writing when her themes were eroticism, womanhood and feminism. Being an outspoken woman was controversial.
Her early poetry is well regarded and highly praised today though.
Storni was among the first women to find success in the male-dominated arenas of literature and theater in Argentina, and as such, developed a unique and valuable voice that holds particular relevance in Latin American poetry.
At age 43, Storni was diagnosed with cancer, and after three years and a radical mastectomy, the cancer persisted. Around 1:00 AM on Tuesday, 25 October 1938. Storni left her room and headed towards the sea at La Perla beach in Mar del Plata, Argentina and died by suicide.
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#ink #drawing #illustration #instart #womeninspiringwomen #alfonsinastorni #poet #poetry #feminism
Lou-Andreas Salomé
Lou-Andreas Salomé killed God when she was a child.
I was fourteen when I became obsessed with Nietzsche. I went to Catholic school, so reading someone say “we killed God” at a time where I thought I might be the only atheist on Earth was almost a relief. I tried to understand Nietzsche then and I'm still at it, so I tried to read everything I could about him. Then, I read that he proposed twice to this one woman, Lou-Andreas Salomé. Just that small mention was enough to catch my eye and start digging and I kept her as a role model throughout my adolescence.
Lou was many things: psychoanalyst, poet, essayist, a well traveled author... but not someone’s wife. Well, she did marry once, but it was a celibate marriage, while having other relationships, mainly with her work. But all that was way after she met her feminist role model, Malwida von Meysenburg and started an intellectual commune with Paul Reé and Nietzsche, with whom she toured through Switzerland and Italy.
To be a woman in the late 1800s, live among men, not marry, have open relationships and write about sensitive topics such as erotism, theology or politics takes a lot of bravery.
She wasn’t just unconventional, she was exceptional.
Even her autobiography shows that. She’s not exposing facts in a linear way, but jumping from anecdote or fact to reflections on her context. She’s not interested in sequential descriptions, no, she wants the thread of her autobiography to be the search of deeper meaning and she does succeed at that.
She was friends with Freud who was her mentor as psychoanalyst, had an intense relationship with Rilke and was overall surrounded by patrons of the arts, intellectuals and artists.
While looking for pieces of her work in libraries or stores, I realised that most of what remains published of hers is correspondence with influential men. Lou’s genius has been eclipsed for a long time by her relationships, even though most of them loved and liked her for her intellectual drive, independence and self-possessedness.
María Teresa Toral
María Teresa Toral was a Spanish chemist, pharmacist and a master engraver.
Born in the first half of the 20th century and as any woman from a wealthy family, she was educated in arts, music, literature and painting, subjects in which she proved to be outstanding at a young age but slowly, she started to feel more attracted to chemistry.
She took two degrees: pharmacy, to please her family and chemistry, for her own pleasure.
She worked closely with Enrique Moles, a renowned chemist, with whom she started investigating areas such as the determination of atomic weights. In order to do that she had to design and build many devices herself. She was one of the most published people in her lab, which led her to get a scholarship in the UK.
Sadly, she could not enjoy said scholarship because of the Spanish Civil War.
Her life is inspiring not just because of her career in science but for her political investment, using all that was in her hands to fight for Spain during its darkest times.
Toral was arrested several times during the Civil War for her collaborations with the Republican Militia making explosives for them and for organizing clandestine antifascist reunions in her pharmacy.
The first time, she was convicted to eight years in prison and was offered a general pardon which she took to start operating at a pharmacy. That pharmacy would be the place where all the clandestine antifa reunions would take place.
In the second arrest, the francoist police was so brutal with her that it took her several weeks to recover from such violence. The New York Times wrote a letter to Franco asking him to not kill her. Marie Curie’s daughters went to the trial themselves to ask for the same thing. Fascist prosecutors felt pressured and decided to not kill her.
After her time in prison, she then exiled to Mexico, where she continued to work as a researcher and started teaching in the National Autonomous University.
María Teresa Toral was a woman of arts and science that would have died fighting for and with those who didn’t want to give up their freedom.
Chavela Vargas
Delirante
Isabel Vargas Lizano, better known as Chavela Vargas, was a Costa Rican-born Mexican singer. She was especially known for her rendition of Mexican rancheras, but she is also recognized for her contribution to other genres of popular Latin American music. She was an influential interpreter in the Americas and Europe.
Started singing in the streets of Mexico and she managed to record more than eighty albums. She used to dress like a man when she was young, and did all the macho things: smoking cigars, drink heavily, carried a gun and sang rancheras in her own peculiar style.
Rancheras, typically, were masculine emotional songs about love and whatnot, but of course, since the display of feelings by men is some sort of crime, it is a thing only allowed to the drunks.
She became a professional singer by her thirties and had to retire for some years while she was recovering from alcoholism, a time in her life that she described as “my 15 years in hell”. She waited 81 years to publicly come out as lesbian, through her autobiography, which wasn’t a surprise for her fans since she refused to change the genders in her songs.
She was inspiration for many authors, artists and musicians, many of whom she could call friends, like Frida Kahlo, Joaquín Sabina, Pedro Almodóvar or Dolores Olmedo.
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#illustration #ink #womeninspiringwomen #illustration #chavelavargas #lgbtq🌈 #music #songwriter
Linda Boreman
Invisible
[TW: SEXUAL ABUSE, RAPE]
Linda Boreman, known as Lovelace, was an American pornographic actress that after quitting became a spokeswoman for the anti-pornography movement.
Some might be wondering how can one go from porn to antiporn, since she was really popular and was doing great in the Golden Age of Porn. Let me tell you, it is very common.
Most porn actresses have a career of less than a year before they get trashed.
As popular as the name “Linda Lovelace” is in porn, the actress managed to work in the business for about six years, having one hit and then falling abruptly. Boreman was 23 when she became an overnight sensation and earned just $1,200 for the film that cost just $60,000 to make, and it has made more than $500 million. ‘I wasn’t paid much but now I’m known, so it’s OK,’ she said at the time.
In her autobiography Ordeal, she described what went on behind the scenes: her partner, who was abusive and violent, was the one who coerced her to partake in hardcore porn productions with humiliation paraphilias such as piss, bestiality, gang rape and gagging. He also pimped her, threatening to hurt her if she didn’t go through with it.
Everywhere I looked, they refer to the abuse she describes as “alleged” because his partner and colleagues have the nerve to say that she “looked” willing everytime. Most sites fail to see that she was a woman with no means in a dangerously abusive environment.
She joined the anti-pornography movement after the publication of Ordeal.
In Catherine MacKinnon’s words: The film [Deep Thorat] was instrumental in establishing pornography as culturally legitimate in the 1970s. [...] Her revelations enabled a change in the way pornography was debated legally and socially, shifting the focus from morality to harm.
Being a feminist doesn’t pay good, she could hardly be independent until her last days, and even then she struggled trying to make ends meet.
Gerda Taro
Gerta Pohorylle, known professionally as Gerda Taro, was a German Jewish war photographer active during the Spanish Civil War. She is regarded as the first woman photojournalist to have died while covering the frontline in a war.
Taro was also the companion and professional partner of photographer Robert Capa. The name "Robert Capa" was originally an alias that Taro and Capa (born Endre Friedmann) shared, an invention meant to mitigate the increasing political intolerance in Europe and to attract the lucrative American market. A significant amount of what is credited as Robert Capa's early work was actually made by Taro.
In an interview with the Spanish daily El País, a nephew of a Republican soldier at the Battle of Brunete explained that she had died in an accident. According to the eye-witness account, she had been run over by a reversing tank and she died from her wounds in El Goloso English hospital a few hours later. The tank driver did not realize what he had done.
Due to her political commitment, Taro had become a respected anti-fascist figure. On 1 August 1937, on what would have been her 27th birthday, the French Communist Party gave her a grand funeral in Paris, drawing tens of thousands of people on to the streets, buried her at Père Lachaise Cemetery, and commissioned Alberto Giacometti to create a monument for her grave.
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PICTURES:
1. Gerda Taro © International Center of Photography Republican militiawoman training on the beach. Outside Barcelona. August 1936.
2. Gerda Taro. Snipers in the Spanish Civil War, 1936
3. Gerda Taro © International Center of Photography Refugees from Málaga in Almería, Spain. February 1937.
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#illustration #ink #womeninspiringwomen #women #photographer #gerdataro
Sylvia Plath
[TW: ABUSE, SUICIDE]
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life, and was treated multiple times with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Her dramatic death became her most famous aspect, and remains so despite her work and talent.She’s yet another woman that met a glorified man who mistreated and abused her: Ted Hughes.
Sylvia Plath killed herself at the age of 30 and by that time, she managed to have already published a collection of poems called “The Colossus and other poems” and had many unpublished and later very well regarded works such as “Ariel”, “Crossing the water” or “Winter trees”, all published by Ted Hughes after their separation and her suicide.
Works like “Ariel” have been marked as the beginning of a movement for American housewives whose ambitions were awoken thanks to it. Plath’s final poems, in Honor Moore’s words were “uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified”. It’s a shame that we didn’t get to enjoy much but Plath’s pain.
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#illustration #ink #womeninspiringwomen #sylviaplath #womenempowerment #poet
Emma Goldman
Anarchist political activist and writer. She loved to dance and one evening, while dancing among fellow anarchists, an associate interrupted her to tell her she shouldn’t be seen having so much carefree fun. In her autobiography, Goldman wrote:
I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown in my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to behave as a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things.
For Goldman, a revolution without dancing, was not a revolution worth having.
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#illustration #ink #emmagoldman #womenempowerment #culture #womeninspiringwomen #anarchism #feminism
