Eva Rocha is working on a sculpture installation to be shown later this spring. (Photo by Eva Rocha)
When I see women marching everywhere in the world, I think of the chorus used in Greek tragedies. In a classical play, while the main characters would carry out heroic actions or villainy, the chorus of performers would often wear identical masks and speak in unison to comment on the misfortunes affecting them all.
I am an artist who has worked in theater. When I started to develop my first group of sculptures based on a chorus to explore the many aspects of objectification, I was told that women are no longer objectified. That was in 2014. I also used to hear everywhere: “The two things one should never talk about are religion and politics.” After the turn in political reality last year, it has been impossible not to talk about politics and the extensions of it in relation to religion, the objectification of women, immigration and all sorts of issues that, by not being discussed, brought us to this moment.
Since early 2017, women have become a chorus of voices commenting on tragedies affecting their gender. How are the issues surrounding women interrelated? How is the underrepresentation of women in politics related to fashion and plastic surgery or immigration or human trafficking? Many people don’t understand the relationship of objectification and the fact that women, on average, make 79 cents to every dollar earned by men, and the pay gap is greater for African-American and Hispanic women. How much is a woman worth?
Marches in Washington, Richmond and elsewhere drew an extraordinary number of women to the streets. Those marches, also joined by men, have in common a solidarity, an empathy for all marginalized groups.
Our modern chorus brought to the surface stories of tragedy, resilience and transcendence. In the months after the first Women’s March on Washington in January 2017, women increasingly stepped into the light to speak out about sexual harassment, assault and all forms of objectification. Many used the hash-tagged refrain “#MeToo” in identifying with others.
As I explored issues of dehumanization through art, I found inspiration in this chorus of women. In 2017, I received grants from the Richmond Memorial Health Foundation and CultureWorks. I proposed an installation that materialized from interactions with women survivors of human trafficking. My idea was to make plaster casts of their faces in an effort to bring their voices from the shadows and into the growing chorus.
Gaining access to these women was not easy, for reasons of confidentiality and security. For a survivor of human trafficking to have her face cast could be a painful trigger. As a result, I had to extend my approach to other women. I spoke with all sorts of women: victims of violence, immigrants, intellectuals, friends and professionals in high-paying jobs. I heard their stories and asked to make castings of them and, while they're being cast, to consider women who are silenced because of human trafficking, abuse or oppression. I asked them to stand in for women who had lost their voices. I thought about the struggle of all women in asserting our humanity — in being recognizable as a vital work force, political force and intellectual force.
While I cast their faces and torsos, I considered how many of the issues facing women are muted. We discussed subjects such as how image affects women and how society is always depreciating vulnerability, sensibility, intuition and other characteristics that compose women’s strength. We talked about how women’s natural sensuality has been associated with sin in many religious contexts, and is still used to justify violence and sexual crimes. I thought about how many of the challenges for women of any social class or race are related to the struggles of women who have been trafficked. I questioned the metrics used to quantify the value of a woman.
Women have strength that comes from their immense capacity to survive. As I removed the plaster shells from the naked torsos, it occurred to me that women from every culture and social class have been denied the totality of self; and, their humanity being stripped, have been valued as a mere object — an object without a voice, tragically lost in a silent chorus.
What I learned, however, is that this valuation is as superficial as a layer of wet plaster on a warm body. As women begin to listen to each other’s voices and to raise each other’s voices up through art and public discourse and community, we are asserting the infinite value and the power of our being. When we refuse to be silenced and we bring our distinct voices together, we protect the profound value of all humanity.
Photo by Spencer Turner
Eva Rocha is a multimedia artist from Brazil. In 2015 she received Richmond magazine’s Theresa Pollak Award for Excellence in the Arts in the category of Emerging Artist.
