Événement

Bother Line

"Are you morally so old-fashioned as to regard female vanity as frivolous?"

This is how Helen Palmer questions her readers about the importance of keeping vanity up to date. Helen is the pseudonym of Clarice Lispector, a Ukrainian writer naturalized Brazilian who used her column in several newspapers to give beauty and femininity tips to women all around the country. The issues raised by Clarice at the time come against the annoyances of Gio Mielle, a Brazilian actress based in NY since 2015.

It is 2018 and feminism, a subject in constant evidence, still leads Gios imaginary to an obsessive interest about her universe as a woman. She finds herself bothered with issues that do not match with her own idea of a woman's place in the world today. Why, despite struggling to make every women know her power and her uniqueness, I still look in the mirror and find myself bothered by a new line that appears on my face?

Perhaps Aphrodite, Goddess of love and beauty, was responsible for creating the first frame of femininity. The figure of a woman coming out of her shell, hair traversing the body, an image full of sensuality and mystery. The goddess who is far from being human, but who finds in the common people the mirror of desperation of who wants to be like her. Is it human to seek perfection? Is human the search for the ideal body, the angelic face, the smooth skin? The humanity of imperfect human-being leads to a kind of inhumanization when it gets to the constant attempt to perfect itself. Human-perfect-inhuman, should that be the goal in a womens life?

What to do with the bombardment of images, products, advertisements that crosses us daily trying to make us need more to be the woman they require me to be - and that we often still try to be. The lines bother, the routines of beauty are still part of the day to day and the discomfort is constant when most women think about what others see on them. Who are these women who live a plastic life, who exaggerate in beauty products, who do all sorts of procedure in the desperation of being as perfect as the model of the magazine. And how much do I have of them? Lines, they bother.

Gio presents a show that touches these subjects sometimes in a personal way, others in a critical, ironic and reflexive way, always bringing to the scene the physical theater that is characteristic of her work as an actress. The text is based on the articles by Helen Palmer - Clarice Lispector - printed in the columns and feminine supplements of the Brazilian press during the 50s and 60s.

From hypocrisy to exposure, this is the result of Gio Mielles own discomfort with the lines that make her the woman she is today.