Ariadne’s thread

Critical text

Maria Hirszman Journalist and art critic.M.A. in Art History from ECA-USP.

Index / Maria Hirszman

«A trail of blood all the way from Madrid to Paris. Wouldn’t that make a good song?».

She did not have time to think again. In the suburbs of Paris, her finger bled in an uncontrollable flood, and she felt as if her soul were escaping through the scratch.

The oeuvre of Beth Moysés is at once multiple and single, authorial and collaborative. Moysés is one of the few Brazilian artists to challenge the taboo of using art to deal with social drama. Since the 1990s, she has made countless incursions into the field of feminine symbolism, more specifically the issue of gender abuse, giving poetic form to non-conformity in the face of the awful but very common phenomenon of domestic violence.

She started by exploring the visual and semantic potential of elements such as wedding dresses, veils, roses, pearls, needles and thread as metaphors for the mythologisation of romantic love — which Moysés describes as one of the root causes of physical and psychological violence against women. Then she took a step further and started to work with this terrible shared memory of suffering, presenting public performances to promote a kind of purging of pain. Her production has a strong autobiographical connotation. A major catalyst for this investigative process was the domestic violence involving her parents, which she had experienced as a child.

A wide range of languages, forms and materials is exploited in Moysés’ artistic production. Yet there is a kind of invisible thread leading from one work to another, one that connects — as Ariadne did — the particular focus of domination to a larger, and therefore less controlled, event in which she brings out — and attempts to reverse — the perverse process of women being dehumanised by those who view them as their possessions. I would tend to divide the artist’s work into two parts: one of a collective and cathartic nature, and the other, more expressive and intimate. The former contains various performances she staged in different parts of the world, starting with 150 women wearing bridal dresses, almost all victims of domestic violence, who paraded along Av. Paulista, São Paulo’s nerve centre. This performance was entirely recorded. The geographical reach of her interventions is surprisingly extensive, with versions featured in several countries, particularly Spain, where artists are less hesitant about addressing dramatic issues than their Brazilian peers.

To organise these interventions around the world, Moysés is supported by several institutions and hundreds of women in different countries, creating a broad network of relationships and connections that enable personal dramas to be developed through collaborative action. Particularly noteworthy about these interventions is the fact that they are both blunt and theatrical. They are artistic expressions and, at the same time, a form of psychological processing of trauma. However, another set of works developed by the artist pertains to a more intimate, controlled and autonomous context. In recent creative works such as Trans-bordando, the purging effect of performance makes room for rigorous and intimate compositions in Moysés’ studio.

Core aspects of her poetics are present in this work with rare subtlety and greater aesthetic refinement. Although less explicitly, her videos also address the collective character of women’s issues, which are mistakenly seen as individual problems rather than effects of a severe social illness. All the more so in a country like Brazil, which sadly ranks high on the list of countries with the most domestic violence perpetrated by men against women, second only to some African nations. But Moysés’ work also prompts reflection on the semantic power of typically female objects (thimbles), attributes (the flow of menstruation or tears), or colours (red and white). Grouped in a sinuous pattern referring to the notion of maps, her silver thimbles are shaken by rain of unknown origin that soon becomes torrential. These recipients of rare silver-plated beauty, containing drops of blood, are taken over by red liquid diluted in water and quiver uncertainly. They attempt to remain steady but are overwhelmed by the force of the water, the might of the colour red, and the intensity of the vertical movement.

The scene refers to the short story “My Blood on the Snow”, in which Gabriel García Márquez tells the story of a young woman who bleeds after her finger is pricked by a rose she is given for her wedding. Her finger is pierced by a thorn (another of the symbolic figures that Moysés used in works such as Despontando Nós), but the apparently superficial wound turns out to be deeper and incurable. It conveys the impossibility of the exchange, revealing both the artificiality of the petty-bourgeois dream of marriage and men’s inability to mature and engage in affective relationships due to standards imposed by a society based on individualism and perversely established social bonds.