WOMART by Paula Bonet
Figueres
7.4.2018
On April 7 of 2018, the artist Paula Bonet made a large-format mural at the Museu del Empordà, located in the city of Figueres. In this piece, the artist meditates on gender issues and intended to appeal to the need to change our view towards women to see her as she is and set her free from the social canons of beauty that have been imposed on them. This intervention is part of the Womart project, an initiative of Rebobinart that aims to reclaim the need to recognize and make more visible the female talent in the visual arts and promote gender equality in all artistic visual disciplines. The realization of this mural has been promoted by the Xarxa Transversal with the support of the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
In the video, Paula Bonet talks about her mural for the WOMART project: why throughout history women have been «the object and not the subject», why women who were valued and awarded disappear once textbooks are printed, and what the fragment of text she has painted on the wall means.
Video transcript (translated from Catalan)3 min 42 s
Paula BonetWomen's presence in the art world is still very much a minority one. Throughout history we have always been the object and not the subject, and only now are we beginning to tell our own story. I am optimistic, because there are more and more of us women who have a voice, who are listened to and who are called on for projects like this one.
There are women who wrote, who were valued, who were given awards; but then, when the textbooks are printed, those women do not appear. It is as though what happened a moment ago happens to women: when we said «women artists», there was silence.
This fragment of text means only one thing: the need to kill —to kill metaphorically— a self you cannot go on living with. It is as if the self formed out of an experience in which patriarchy weighs so heavily kept mutilating us. Enough of our being the object and not the subject, because it is us, women, who want to narrate the history of women, which is also a universal history.
Video transcript, edited for reading: repetitions and verbal fillers have been removed, the text has been punctuated and speakers are identified.
