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YOU SHOULD FEEL SAFE HERE

ALESSANDRA MANCINI-VARGAS

Mancini-Vargas' work delves into ongoing research-creation, with the goal of articulating deeply felt experiences of repressed sexual liberation, trauma, and bodily autonomy. In her project, Text Me When You Get Home [Text me when you get home], she fuses performance art with wearable prints when she asked viewers to answer the question: Why is it up to me to protect myself from men? Participants were invited to write their answers on an earring worn by Mancini-Vargas, surprising the audience by how long the earring becomes, filled with answers given by women and female-identified people.

This is the starting point of Mancini-Vargas' residency project, Ego Death: —a wearable garment that confronts the harsh façade that women wear for self-preservation, while also questioning the performative nature of femininity. The choice to represent this protective façade as a robe was not arbitrary. It is a deliberate choice that symbolizes the social expectations and limitations imposed on women.— The materials and color she uses also have their semiotic place: the dress is made of paper mache and Japanese rice paper; The dress is white, with the purpose of remembering the good and virginal girl that society expects and punishes.

In Mancini-Vargas' vision, dress is also a canvas for rebellion and self-expression. Thus the artist invites viewers to share her stories and other writings as a way to challenge the norms of patriarchal, heteronormative and dominant culture, as a step in the direction of recovering agency through the ritualization of self-love, self-compassion. and radical tenderness.

To complement Ego Death, Mancini-Vargas also collaborated with “T.A.C.O.” Print Shop” by creating a series of Mono Prints that are essentially pages taken from her diary printed in large format for everyone to see. Each with a truism or a bold statement that matches the garment on a grand scale.

Next to the work, she asks: “In a world that often blames women for the difficulties they endure: how can we fight back? How is tenderness cultivated in the face of adversity? If you are speaking on behalf of someone you care about, what message would you like to convey on their behalf? And how can we embrace radical tenderness, both for ourselves and for those around us?

Using the materials in the chart below, she writes a message anywhere on the robe, answering one or more of the questions above.

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