On Saturday 14.5. the Finnish group of Eva’s Ribs has presented it’s work for the first time to public during the laboratory “Body as a Conflict Zone: open installations, performances and workshops” at Caisa Cultural Centre, Helsinki. Body as a Conflict Zone consisted of 8 different rooms approaching the subject from variable sides and points of views. One of the rooms was dedicated to violence against women and gender based discrimination – the Eva’s Ribs room.
It took less then a week to turn the basic office room into a space filled with visual, audio and video installations, live performers, articles, statistics and “interactive walls” on which the audience could write their comments, thoughts, opinions or just read the existing ones.
Behind a blurry plastic curtain covered in a not too happy statistics from the EU report about gender based discrimination, violence against women from 2014 (http://fra.europa.eu/…/fra-2014-vaw-survey-main-results-apr…), we see women’s figures.
We are being invited in and witness a space divided into smaller “worlds”, where this figures become alive:
“Home sweet home” is said on the wall, where a young woman is hopelessly trying to put the bits and pieces of the broken home together.
“It cost me a lot but there’s one thing that I’ve got – it’s my man…” sings the other woman dressed up, putting her makeup on, covering bruises and tears and getting ready for yet another date with the him. Because she loves him and she forgives him everything.
And then we see a young teenager, suffocating under the amount of violence in the media and TV, silently begging for help or cursing everyone and everything around with the help of the graffiti on the wall.
Last we see a woman in her wedding dress. We follow her life and fluctuations of love, agony, violence, despair, hope, hysteria round after a round.
Among those worlds we can stop and see the interviews from Helsinki streets: what do people think of women, men, gender equality and violence? We can also write and share our opinions, we can read articles, stories or we can stop, close our eyes and just listen to the many voices of women and reflect on the complex problematics of violence in lives of women and humans in general.
Any violence is unacceptable! Is there something we can do?
– that’s the last question we see when exiting the room. So isn’t there actually?