On Monday, October 7, at 6:30 p.m., the opening of the Woman Scars exhibition will take place at Seneca Anticafe (Strada Arhitect Ion Mincu 1). The exhibition will have a preview between October 4-6 at Street Delivery Bucharest, on Arthur Verona Street.
Woman Scars is a photo-audio project that brings together the portraits of women on whose bodies time has left the scars-testimonies of adverse life events: illnesses, operations, losses, accidents, mistreatment, events that, far from constituting an infirmity, on the contrary , have transformed their wearers into stronger, wiser, more confident, freer women. Each woman’s photo is accompanied by an audio story narrated by herself. This is the story of the scar depicted by the portrait and the story of the event that produced it, bringing about transformation in the life of its bearer. The project has as its starting point the self-portrait of the author, who used her own story to open an empathetic dialogue with the women who were photographed and interviewed.
The series started in February this year and will bring together, at the end, 35 photo-audio portraits that will be published on project website. 20 of these portraits will be found in the project exhibition, which will remain at Seneca until October 19, after which it will continue to be exhibited in an oncology hospital.
“Sometimes, the events that leave traces on our body represent much more than the pain caused at the moment. They can mark the beginning of a new life”, says the author of the portrait series. “The idea of the project started from my own experience and my own scar. Still reflecting on the fundamental changes produced in my life as a result of the episode that produced it, I have come to believe that the good lessons of life sometimes come in a brutal form, precisely to be taken seriously. And I wanted to explore that idea by looking at other cases of similar experiences. In parallel, and it’s no coincidence, maybe it was also a progressively awakened awareness following the waves caused by phenomena like #metoo, I became very attentive to the way women’s lives, from whatever social category they come from, are, in chronically, subject to multiple sources of stress that end up undermining their health. So Woman Scars became a story about the traces left on women’s bodies by traumatic life events that, far from making victims of their carriers, on the contrary, turned them into stronger, more resilient, wiser women.
I wanted to give a voice to this perspective on things, so beyond the portrait photos showing each one’s scar, I wanted to accompany the visual image, which can sometimes be difficult to look at, with the story behind it and the account of how the event what caused it changed the wearer’s life. It’s a collective story about what makes us strong, despite everything.
It’s another story about beauty, but a beauty that, as Andreea, one of the women I photographed, says, comes from the attitude, not from the way our body looks. And the attitude I wanted to capture is that of pride, of acceptance: this happened to me, this is who I am, I show myself to you as I am, I feel better this way.”
Daria Ghiuart critic and journalist at Radio Romania Cultural:
“How does the body look in the history of art, how many ages has it gone through in the history of representations? Golden proportions, dethroned by other golden proportions, the search for symmetry, numerous definitions of beauty, a culturally coded beauty, infinite calculations in search of harmony, the association of beauty with a certain state of well-being, with youth, with goodness; moreover, beauty is a matter of the individual, of uniqueness.
But what does a project like Women Scars want to tell us? First of all, that we are at a time when the body is more than ever at the center of our concerns. We are in an era where the body comes into relationship with the identity, an identity over which we have total control. If the above examples talk about the body in relation to the aesthetic categories, with the beautiful and the ugly (that’s where the fight is), in a photo-audio project like Women Scars important is something else entirely: the celebration of the vulnerable body, a body that does not demands attention, a body that does not want to violently exhibit something to gain something else. It’s a body that gains its power through total ownership, a kind of ownership that we absolutely need at the level of public discourse.”
Eliza Zdru she is a documentary film director. He has made two feature-length documentaries and is currently working on a third. Woman Scars is her first photographic project in which she seeks to create impactful visual stories that empower the female voice. Eliza is also a film and photography teacher at the American International School in Bucharest.
We thank the women who agreed to take part in the project and become vulnerable in front of the camera and the recorder to tell their story of power: Laura Găvan, Andreea Matei, Andreea Geamanu, Cristina Gora, Karin Ungureanu, Florentina, Mirona Radu, Macy Nazzarini, Cornelia Cojanu, Georgeta Albu, Stefania Apostol, Rodica Parase, Oana Gherghinescu, Emanuela Macra, Teodora Dumitru, Ionela Dragan, Mela Mihai, Sorina, Cristiana Zaharia, Ioana Chicet-Macoveiciuc
Project co-financed by the National Cultural Fund Administration.
Source: www.iqads.ro
