What are you going to wear tonight is surely one of the most asked questions every Friday in chats between friends, as part of the preparation ritual for the plan that will kick off the weekend. Of course, at that moment, no one expects that, hours later, it could end up turning into a condemnatory: “What were you wearing?” The formulation that, to this day, is still repeated after experiencing episodes of sexual violence, regardless of how, when and where the events occur. From there, it has become the title of the exhibition promoted by the Ministry of Equality that seeks to reflect on the questioning and guilt to which victims of sexual assault are subjected for the clothes they were wearing at the time they were assaulted.
Leonora Carrington, the surrealism artist marked by a group rape of Carlists in Madrid
Further
The exhibition, located in the Madrid Costume Museum, under the Ministry of Culture and Sports, will keep its doors open until April 30. Your entry works as a declaration of intent about the way in which you automatically question. A mirror puts the public in front of their wardrobe chosen for the visit, and the definition of the word pattern, which is another of the protagonists of the exhibition: “Model according to which other objects are produced.” In this case, the culture of rape, the revictimization of women victims of sexual violence and the serious etcetera that the exhibition seeks to dismantle through the stories of eight of them.
Their cases materialize in the recreation of the clothes they were wearing the day they were attacked. And they are accompanied by their intimate narrations, which place the assistant face to face with a painful reality that is injected into the body with a stitch. And not because there’s blood, torn panties, or ripped fly. It’s used clothes, but clean. Footwear included. And corresponding to different bodies, ages and styles.
The Ministry of Equality commissioned the exhibition to the communication agency Volando Vengo, with which they had already collaborated on other previous projects. The social worker and sociologist Cristina Mateos, a doctor specialized in gender violence, has been one of its organizers, and explains to this newspaper that the institution wanted to count on them because of their “feminist conscience”, given the involvement of the victims that they were going to carry.
“We wanted to get out of the spectacularization of violence and deaths”, describes the also professor, who has been mainly in charge of social diagnosis and the accompaniment of the women who have shared their cases. “If we are doing an exhibition to break patterns, we needed a re-educated look at sexual violence,” she explains. In addition, she points out that it would not have been therapeutic: “Indulging in pain, blood and hardness does not allow recovery.”
The garments of these “seamstresses”, as they are defined in the exposed panels, are “woven together with the details of what they lived through”. Six of these women offered their stories for the exhibition; the other two, corresponding to a person over 80 years of age and another trans person in their twenties, were reconstructed based on information from real cases published in the press.
Their testimonials accompany the sets, in the form of text and also audio, which can be accessed through QR codes so that each visitor can know them individually. And, finally, various data about each of them. The room is impressive due to its diversity, although there is one of the pieces that is particularly startling: a colorful dress, leggings that reach the knee, sandals and a children’s size headband.
They belong to Adriana, a Colombian woman who was assaulted with total impunity by her brother from the age of 4 to 11. They never believed her word because he was “the darling” of the family. After emigrating from Colombia to Spain, she began a long process to move away from violence and heal. Years later, she learned that her nephew’s daughter was being sexually assaulted by her brother. “I began to relive what I had gone through with mine and I had the feeling that the same thing had happened to this girl and to others in the neighborhood,” she says. She decided to act and testify at the trial.
Reveling in pain, blood and hardness does not allow recovery
Cristina Mateos
— Curator of the exhibition ‘What were you wearing?’
Her words are shown next to the data from the Macro-survey on Violence against Women, carried out in 2019 by the Government Delegation against Gender Violence. The figures are disheartening: 39% of the women who have suffered sexual violence before the age of 15 mention a male relative as the aggressor (13.5% the father or stepfather, 61% the brother or stepbrother and 27% another familiar male).
The texts have not lent themselves to the spectacularization mentioned by the sociologist and social worker Cristina Mateos either: “People may think that they are going to hear how many times they have been penetrated or the damage they have suffered. But that would not have been ethical or pedagogical either. It was not our goal and it could perpetuate violence against women.”
Art as a recovery tool
The project that gave rise to this exhibition, and which was the one that the Ministry of Equality wanted to bring to Spain, originated in 2014 at the University of Oregon, promoted by professors Wyant-Hiebert and Jennifer Brockman, who were inspired by the poem What was I wearing? (What was she wearing?) by Mary Simmerling. They used testimonials collected in personal interviews with students and, nearly 10 years later, more than 200 organizations and public institutions have replicated this installation in countries around the world.
Mateos shares that in their adaptation to Spain they have wanted to broaden the focus so that it is not only linked to educational environments. They were looking for “a general awareness”. “In the narratives of sexual violence there has been manipulation. We have grown up with the idea that they were isolated cases, of people straying into dark alleys, but that is not how they have told us. The figures reveal that 60% is related to known environments, including the couple”, says the sociologist and social worker.
Above all, the goal was to “create an exhibition that cared for the victims, caring for the stories, without making pornography of violence or rape. Relate the cases to raise awareness but without sensationalism”. To do this, they have made the women who have given their experiences participants in the entire creative process, to whom they have also offered continuous therapeutic support. “We wanted this exposure to improve their quality of life, not affect it. It was vital not to leave them abandoned with a trauma worse than the one they had ”, she indicates. They have had power over the selection of each word, the search for clothing and even furniture: “It was important that they make decisions, that they could always express their needs. That this was a space that gave them power.”
The center of the room is presided over by the eight garments, at the end of which is a sculpture of a woven heart on a panel entitled Cutting the patterns of rape culture. “In order to be able to see where they come from, it was necessary to describe the social, political and cultural framework and the media that have been setting up the stories far from the truth of the women who suffer the attacks, which start from the patriarchal culture and from rape that protects the aggressors”, comments Mateos, sharing that the aforementioned sculpture allowed them to follow the common thread of patronage that is the backbone of the exhibition. “It represents that sick social heart because sexual violence is something that affects the whole society”, he describes, “that there was beauty and art was a way of taking care of the pain and the women victims”.
The interdisciplinary team behind the exhibition has included people from different fields such as social workers, psychologists, designers, sculptures, visual artists and editors. Among them has been the therapist Carmen Sánchez Romero who, according to Mateos, insisted on the relevance of art as a way of approaching this reality: “He continually told us that sexual violence always generates disaffection, a refusal to relate to what we are reading. A ‘I’m not that’, ‘it won’t happen to me’, ‘this is unbearable’, ‘I don’t want to read it’, ‘I don’t want to see it’. It was important that the people who went to see the exhibition felt in a safe and comfortable space, that their conscience was open”.
repair space
Visit What were you wearing? Dismantling patterns on sexual violence stir. Reading and listening to the testimonials and exploring the data works like punches in the conscience, the stomach and even the throat. But the exhibit is not meant to be a place of destruction, unease, or hopelessness. On the contrary. At its culmination they have reserved what they call ‘repair space’. “A place of refuge, a necessary stop to distance yourself from pain and damage and connect with the emotional and hope. We invite you to stop inside it, rest, listen, breathe, reflect and also participate in this collective creation of our patrons”, indicates a sign at its entrance.
It is a warm area where light reigns. There are chairs, carpets, water is heard falling. There is also the option of accessing poems through QR codes and there are sheets of paper and markers so that anyone who wants to leave a message can do so. In the small wicker baskets that contain them, different typographies, experiences, supports and company come together. “It is a claim for the repair spaces that they need. Also so that within the itinerary you could sit down to breathe and say ‘my goodness’. A space for you, for reflection, to ask yourself questions”, explains the social worker and sociologist.
Mateos claims this space as part of the essence of the exhibition, about which he defends: “We can all suffer sexual violence anywhere, but sexual violence is removed, reparation is possible.” For this reason, the exhibition has been conceived as a thread that holds together the stories and pain of women who are victims of rape. This is how one of his posters describes it: “The slow process of sewing his own wounds becomes, between these panels, and with the hope of a new patronage by society, part of a healing and healing rite” .