Type of work: Performance
Year: 2015
Length: 30 minutes
Photos by Luiza Palhares

Description
A woman in a wedding dress decides to surrender and throws herself onto a barbed wire trench which rips her dress out.

About the work
Among many aspects, it may be said that this performance frets the female freedom in a complex way. In the majority of patriarchal societies women can only leave the family and eventually start their sexual life after the matrimonial ceremony. Not fortuitously, in a wedding dress, the woman in “I surrender” finds a barbed wire trench as though she were in a prison or any other place where the space in which her body can move is limited and her desires are built through a threat of torture.

By this moment, the ambiguous theme about “the surrender” once the woman, now surrendered, throws herself onto the barbed wire trench that undresses her by ripping her wedding outfit apart making her body nude and free from the social contract established by the matrimony. It’s relevant to say that the woman’s clothes can represent a gender, race, ethnicity as well as a social class. It is as if, forgetting her own “self” social position fully giving in to the limit that her own self can assure her, she ended up suppressing this “own self” and outbreaking its limit. What is left so far is a raw and naked life open to new forcomings.

Thus, rendition, the “let it be” of oneself, assumes a character of bliss, a feeling of leaving oneself from deep inside, once the limit, that Other censor, the patriarchal barbed wire, is led to the apex of female’s body intimacy, therefore eating it up and taking its “qualification” away metaphorically represented by the clothes. At the same time, this “disqualification”, that means, this nudity, talks about new “self” which sprouts from the slave-wife’s death leaving just a so-called redemption as well as her own freedom of an undressed and natural life of a huge opening into the interdicts from what the rendition is born.