Anarkia Andarilha: Centro Cultural de Furnas, Rio de Janeiro

Of a political, feminist and autobiographical nature, the idea behind this exhibition is to look at the journey of my female body in the urban landscape, going through my experiences with graffiti, rediscovering myself in graffiti, until I reached my current artistic production, thus composing the persona Anarkia Boladona, now also a wanderer.

 

Gender is an important issue in my journey to explore this city that oppresses me. I transgress its limits and challenge the borders imposed on my body. This body is also an object of repression. Treated as irresponsible and dangerous, so often subjugated in our history. A body that is used as a market currency and which, even in contemporary times, is still a limit to being. With every step I take in search of the ideal space for my expression, I transgress a law that prevents me from being there.

 

As a starting point, my work is a priori oriented towards my city: Rio de Janeiro. There I reaffirm my identity as a woman, a suburbanite, subject to the rules established there. It's not so bad to belong to this space, since it is far ahead of issues such as Middle Eastern veils, but still not as free as Dutch highrises. This intermediate point in which this city dwells cannot be analyzed solely as a territorial issue, but rather as part of a globalized problem in a scope that goes beyond the limits of the West and becomes a plural issue. The domination of women's bodies is a critical issue in which different levels of oppression limit female expression across the globe.

Faced with this approach, reflections on the body and space begin my autobiographical work, in which my personal experiences and my experiences of spaces become political issues.

During the research for this series, I visited three continents, ten countries and several cities around the world. Field research carried out at random, in the face of invitations that my street art production gave me. Cultural differences collide in such a way as to make me understand who I am, why I am the way I am and how this is reflected in my artistic process. It was on this path that I developed a dialog with the city of the other, and thus understood and matured my production.

 

There were flashes in my mind in which I thought I inhabited the wrong skin. It distressed me to want to speak, act and think like a male. I imagined what it would be like to possess a phallus and the power and pleasure I could enjoy from it. I was frightened by the possibility of not belonging to my gender, thus revealing my primary inner conflicts. Finally, in a relieved breath, I understood that my revolt was never about having a female body, but about feeling like a slave to femininity.

Being born in this body shouldn't define who I am. I believe that my doubts were never about being a woman, but about what representations and values this physical body would add to my life and how, based on this construction, my body's relationships with others would be constituted. My anguish is the restricted possibility of deciding. Although I can contradict and seek sovereignty, what torments me is how difficult it is to live in front of the gaze of others.

 

According to Bataille (Eroticism, 1980), violence is forbidden so that we can organize ourselves as a society and dedicate ourselves to work, but it is also true that violence is part of our everyday world and our nature. Exercising it made me feel powerful. This incompatibility between my needs and social issues marginalized me when I opted for aggression against the city walls as the main way of expelling my violent energy.

In a letter to Albert Einstein (1932), Freud states that the death instinct becomes a destructive instinct when it is directed outwards, towards objects; and furthermore, that the organism preserves its own life by destroying the life of others. This is what it was like to violate the city through graffiti: a way of killing it so that it wouldn't kill me. So that its laws, people and buildings wouldn't suffocate and annul me. During this production, my resocialization depended on a transformation in the way I dealt with the outside, understanding my psyche and dominating my inner self, which until then I considered an enemy.

 

On this journey of self-knowledge, it is also necessary to analyze the external circumstances in which the dynamics of my psychic apparatus were born. Understanding myself as a constructed being is the first step towards changing the way my inner experiences take place and the way I see and deal with the world.

 

The stark division between masculine and feminine is the most difficult part of this journey of understanding my “I”. It's not having a phallus or lying down with a woman that I desire, but enjoying the option of moving between gender behaviors. What I want is to deconstruct ideals between men and women, creating more subtle differences. I need to be left free to decide where I want to stay, even if that stay changes all the time. Being transgender or not, getting rid of the stereotypes that surround me, even if I want to inhabit some of them, that would be being a woman, in my ideas on the subject.