Purga (Purge) - Porto Feminist Festival, May 2019 - Portugal
Conceived for and supported by the Porto Feminist Festival, 2019, Purga is an urban intervention of performative character, conceived to expose the question of harassment experienced by Women (including trans women and femme/feminine-identifying genderqueer and non-binary) and to highlight the variation of experiences in an artistic way to the public space. It is a project that seeks to explore through experimentation between the exchange of stories, collective drift and spontaneous installation in a public space.
The action invites women to participate in an experience divided in three moments: workshop, urban drift and open installation:
Workshop - Women are invited to either divide, to share, to unburden stories or memories that involve any type of harassment whether structurally within the workplace, or on the street. Each woman is invited to bring an object that represents the symbol of its history: a piece of clothing, a watch, a book, a shoe, or any other object symbolically associated with a narrative of history. Women will then be encouraged to write a short text, or some words to be attached to the object.
Urban drift - All the women walk in a group along the street, taking a collective urban drift. The act of walking symbolizes the woman's moment of empowerment.
Open installation - The women leave the object and its attached story made during the workshop, in a public space, creating an installation of objects. The installation of objects aims to share a set of harassment narratives, and in a more personal and poetic way, for a woman, the act of leaving the object functions as a ritual of abandonment and liberation.
The project was conceived and delivered by the arts collective Apartamento4B: Claire Sivier, Fernanda Zotovici, Izabel Barboni and Rayan Merhy, Brazilian and British artists who work to bridge the gap between art and architecture in the public space.
Photo credits: Ana Willerding
