Tapete Manifesto Installation
The invisibility of violence against women
Brazil is the fifth country that kills the most women in the world. Every 1.5 hours there is a femicide and 5 women are raped every hour in Brazil. 472 women are murdered each month. 140 women are raped per day. Will we continue in this tragic invisibility? Manifesto is attitude... Attitude is affection, not just a statement of rules that represent thoughts...
A Mat of Death and Life
The installation is a poetic manifesto, a cartography with silk-screened panties and skeletons to show the blatant invisibility of this tragic reality of tradition of violence against women. The intention was to create a space of reflection on the theme: violence against women, as well as its invisibility. A space to reflect on that discomfort with the sociocultural vulnerabilities, that we, women, have supported for centuries, as well as to incite reflections and questions about the massification and vulgarization of death nowadays.
An attempt to transform violence into poetry,...To see and unveiling the invisibility... To see and reveal our invisibility... All from the installation space.
Could poetry change this tragic reality?
Manifesto is a way of existence... I present myself as I build up myself... To create the power to exist... To create reality... To create our own power and grow in it the power to exist.
“O Tapete Manifesto was built carrying seeds of life and death, initially it was a manifesto against violence, machismo/patriarchy and inequality. I carried this question throughout the entire process: could poetry transform this tragic reality? In this journey, everything changed and I found faith, strength, poetry and the ferocity of life in me and in every woman who has suffered or suffers any form of violence just for being a woman, for occupying her space in the world, for existing. Now Tapete Manifesto is built with the seeds of resistance and has become a space to make visible/reveal violence against women with a clear proposal for their empowerment, not only a denunciation through the poetic manifesto."
Thais Medeiros
Actress, director, playwright, plastic artist, founder of Coletivo Galeria Gruta and producer
Support: Goethe Institute
April 18th up to 22nd / PHATOS Theater, Munich – Germany
Thaís Medeiros' artistic residency at Magdalena Munchen 2018, at Villa Waldberta
Technical Data Sheet
Invisible Places – Women in the Arts
Curatorship - Kordula Lobeck de Fabris
Manifesto Carpet Installation - Creation – Thaís Medeiros
Photography: Coletivo Galeria Gruta
Villa Waldberta Artistic Residence
Support: Goethe-Institut São Paulo, Casa Castro Quadros e Molduras, Stampinny Estamparia e Comunicação Vizual, collective funding CGG