Bruna Alcantara

How ironic: to pervert the notion of sewing – linked to female activities – to denounce what men do to us.

I was born in a city of 30,000 inhabitants, in the countryside of Paraná. That’s where I stayed until I was 18. I had a childhood in the backwoods, chasing chicken, playing with mud, and riding horses. But then again, I had around me everything that a male chauvinist and backwards society can bring to a child: I was a girl “raised to get married”.

As a legacy of those times, in addition to various traumas, I carry handicrafts, embroidery, and sewing, as skills. After all, I was also a girl who was taught to make her own trousseau even before I knew what marriage, gender identity, and monogamy meant.

I introduced my text explaining my origin, because it is always present, even if subjectively, in my artistic process. I can say that my work begins with the internal/external conflict and with indignation, mainly over issues related to women and inequalities.

Added to that, aged 26, I discovered an unwanted pregnancy. Since then, my work has been about the mother that I (and millions of other Brazilian women) didn’t want to be and that I am. With words and judgments ranging from “single mother” to “you’re a mother, you need to behave”, or “Who is your son with?”. I also research the relationship of the Catholic Church to the Christian guilt that I carry in autobiographical works, crossed by affective memory, such as the oratories.

If social pressure wasn’t enough, my generation also has to deal with the algorithms that have always suggested happy pregnant women. I tried: I then started my first series, Maternity, which has lasted 9 years. In self-portraits, pregnant, postpartum, breastfeeding, and even today, with a child out of the womb, I have photography as an ally. But I don’t stop there: photographs are the starting point for making embroideries, flags, and paste-ups that I spread on my own social networks, with viral content, characteristic of memes, and also, on the street, on walls, in places where I most like to be, tensioning the public and the private that so much remind of society’s relationship with female bodies.

Also, with old photographs, found in used bookstores wherever I go, or in garbage, I narrate stories of a contemporary Brazil, with content from newspaper headlines. There is a journalist in me after all, in search of factual content, who ironically deals with the political situations we have been through in recent years: bizarre speeches by the former president, men who think they can abuse a girl because she wears “Anita shorts “, or inquiries carried over for years, like “where’s Queiroz?”.

Also, as a scream, last year I developed a manifesto: Mães Também Gozam, which talks about the obstetric violence I suffered: the episiotomy and the more than 10 stitches they gave me between the vagina and the anus. To do so, I sewed a flag in English (Mums Also Cum) as a performance action, to hang in one of the main tourist spots in the city where my son was born, Porto.

Then, in Brazil, the phrase in Portuguese has already been to several capitals. I even joke that it went on an advertising plane, all over Copacabana. I seek to question the authority of machismo, which thought it could sew on me, and on millions of other women, the “husband’s stitch”, that extra stitch, so that the man can feel pleasure in the intercourse with a woman who has just given birth.

Also, in the search for re-signification of old objects, I search for mirrors and photograph them, as an extension of my own body. Centered on landscapes that dialogue with the beautiful image of the perfectionist pursuit of female aesthetics, or what is expected of it. In the Reflect Yourself series, which has already covered more than 5,000 kilometers, I find in myself the healing of traumas, to rediscover enjoyment, and pleasure, and the woman I was told would cease to exist after becoming a mother.

I’m alive, whatever the cost: my body pulsates.