FEMBRA                         
PLACERE                          
GRILLUS MONTICOLA

The project Fembra placere, by Margarita Valdivieso, is a compilation of several works that focus on the stereotype of the paisa woman as an object of pleasure, built through fashion, the media and the patriarchal structures in place in the city of Medellín.  

 

This "specimen" as she names it to make the parallel with biology, is a native of the area and responds to cultural patterns of behavior that could vary as long as the conditions of the environment allowed it to subsist in another way, as Margarita after her observation maintains, that the Fembras placere paisas are obliged to behave as machines or objects of pleasure to ensure their survival in the city, otherwise the power structures that hold them would force them to disappear not only as a female variant of the hominid species but also as females, so that they would not ensure their place of symbolic representation and much less their biological place. 

 

The series Fembra Placere also shows with a certain irony the apparatus, the miriñaque, the plot of the stereotyped character that it classifies as exemplary, not to disqualify or criticize it, but to reveal it in context; on one hand it presents it as a religious relic and on the other, as a kitsch object coming from an apparent and believing culture, hence both characteristics end up turning it not only into a symbolic variation of the species, but also into a fetish or a reliquary.      

 

Natalia Restrepo.  

 

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