by Elena Tavelli @elenitatavelli
Resistencia Sudaca: Latina immigrant artist, Natacha Voliakovsky turns the debate on reproductive rights into visceral performances based on the Argentinean legalization of abortion.
What does it mean to be a woman in art? With a shifting political landscape and women’s protests being held all around the globe, how should female artists address their battle on their work? Natacha Voliakovsky says “I don’t think I can help”, she states. “But I do try to make people reflect and wonder about the rules imposed… it is an urgency that I carry in my body”.
Five years have already passed since the beginning of the #MeToo movement. By the end of 2017, in the wake of Harvey Weinstein allegations, women of the film industry decided to speak up for their rights. Where? At the red carpet, the new accepted venue for making a social or political point. During the first months of 2018, at both the Golden Globes and the British Academy Film Awards, women wore black gowns to help bring diversity, gender parity and equal pay to public debate.
The following year, at the Cannes Film Festival, a whole Argentinian film crew chose green gowns. While waving green scarfs in green dresses, women marched chanting “solidarity for women”. The team was showcasing the documentary Que Sea Ley (“Let It Be Law”), which followed the battle over Argentina’s abortion law. Before its liberalization in 2020, the voluntary interruption of pregnancy in this country was only accepted in cases of rape, or if the mother’s health was in danger, what motivated large-scale protests and a battle between green scarfs (pro-choice) and light blue ones (pro-life).
All those incidents coincided with a major scandal in the United States, in which Alabama ‘s governor signed a bill to ban all abortions, even for exceptions previously accepted in Argentina. Unfortunately, in recent years, this has not been the only ocasion. The right to abortion in the U.S. has been weakened by an increasingly restrictive panorama with hostile laws in several states, obstructing or banning this women’s right.
To sum up, abortion is not just a global south issue, neither a red-carpet show. It is now a historical moment for women not backing down until abortion is safe, legal and accessible for all. Women’s rights are also human rights and their freedom to choose should not be considered a crime, but a public health care concern.
Natacha Voliakovsky is a Sudaca Latinx Activist, Political Performance Artist and Hi-Testosterone woman. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, now lives and works in Harlem, New York. Her work fights for the sovereignty of the body through performance pieces that hack the system from the inside, showing its oppressive rules on migration, gender identity and self-construction.
As an artist, Voliakovsky is not interested in pointing out what she disagrees with. Instead, she wants to reveal the oppressive system by playing an active role in it. Through site-specific performances and cosmetic surgeries performed on her body, she is interested in exploring the relevance of context as an agent of change and resignification, as well as in deconstructing the social body to raise awareness on issues regarding gender identity and self-perception.
Until Argentineans finally got the abortion law in December 2020, Natacha has been using her body as a tool to raise awareness of this right. Since her arrival to the U.S. in 2019, she has performed various actions to that effect. In The Weight of the Invisible (NY, 2019), Voliakovsky was dressed in black. She entered the place very silently and stood behind a desk, where she gave instructions –both in Spanish and English– to her small, intimate audience. One by one, she would transport 400ml of blood from a plastic recipient to another, containing a dry and white shirt. The measure was equivalent to the amount of blood lost when taking a Misoprostol abortion pill. She repeated this action 26 times till the pristine cloth was completely covered in 7 liters of blood and turned red. She held its heaviness in the air for a while and after taking off her black clothes, she buttoned it up to carry herself the weight of a clandestine abortion, held every half hour in Argentina, before abortion was legalized. We cannot hide what is really going on. Legally or not, abortion happens. And something has to be done.
The Weight of the Invisible (NY, 2019) Natacha Voliakovsky. Photo by Diana Haro. Photo courtesy of the artist.
For Daily Reflection (NY, 2019), she first bought the daily newspaper. After reading it, she selected the pieces of news which described oppressive situations towards the corporalities of Latino immigrants, women and non-binary identities. Subsequently, she ripped off those which legitimized the white, western, middle class thinking, meaning for that, the kind of thinking in American society. One by one, Voliakovsky inserted the pieces of paper inside her mouth. She chewed them as if by absorbing the ink she could swallow the symbolic meaning of them. But although she kept introducing all her news inside her mouth, barely being able to close it, the paper was not degraded and neither was its content. After masticating for a while with any results at all, she took the bolus out of her mouth and left it on the floor.
Daily Reflection (NY, 2019) Natacha Voliakovsky. Photo by Ludmila Kreichman. Photo courtesy of the artist.
State Control (2021), was part of INVERSE Performance Art Symposium and first performed at The Momentary Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, a super conservatory state. Voliakovsky was completely dressed in black holding a white flag with red text: ‘My body is not state property’. It was written with blood, the same artist’s blood that was dripping off her body and giving shape to the phrase ‘State Control’ on her abdomen. She stood there for a long time before smearing the blood all over her body and removing it with the flag. The action ended with the artist leaving the reddened white flag alone, under a silent cry, exactly where she had been standing before. Women and those who are more fragile stand alone, their survival depends on State decisions.
State Control (AK 2021) Natacha Voliakovsky. Photo courtesy of the artist.
The battle will continue. Voliakovsky’s most recent performance, titled For a State out of our Bodies (2022), as the phrase depicted on a white flag the artist soaked in five liters of blood. This took place in the street, more precisely in Foley Square, in front of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, also called “Mother Court”. With this performance, Voliakovsky left a visible trace on the fact that our lives depend on the laws that attempt to biopolitically control our bodies. The artist claims women’s freedom: Out of our bodies!
What does it mean to be a woman in art? With a shifting political landscape and women’s protests being held all around the globe, how should female artists address their battle on their work? The same as Voliakovsky’s title for an earlier performance piece, we could say: ‘It is an open-ended question’. But Natacha prefers to present herself as a survivor. “I live in constant fear of going through the same abuse where I come from”, she says. Therefore, she feels the responsibility to share her experience and use art as a transforming agent of those wounds of her own and women in general. “I don’t think I can help”, she states. “But I do try to make people reflect and wonder about the rules imposed… it is an urgency that I carry in my body”.
About the artist
Natacha Voliakovsky (Buenos Aires, 1988) is a Judeo-Sudaca activist, hi-testosterone woman and political performance artist whose work focuses on the analysis of social behavior and questions the boundaries of established rules. Her work poses a shift in the limits of artistic practices around social deconstruction and the sovereignty of the body, using performance, video, photography, and installation as means. Voliakovsky’s practice is currently focused on public space as territory to be reclaimed, specifically by women, non-binary identities, and minorities, researching social behavior in public spaces as an extension of gender oppressive dynamics that constrain the way women, LGBTQ communities, and minorities inhabit these places.
She was selected at INVERSE (AR, 2021), Creative Capital Taller (NY, 2020) EMERGENYC at the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics (NYU, 2019), the intensive workshop in performance art at Venice International Performance Art Week (2018), Überbau Haus, Brazil residency (2017) and Sur Polar residency, Antarctica (2014), among others. She’s created NVMethod, a series of training techniques for performance art. As of 2019, she’s developing Argentina Performance Art, the first research platform on performance art in Argentina.
https://natachavoliakovsky.com/
About the author
Elena Tavelli was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1992. She has a MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid). Currently, she is the artistic managing director of Fundación Santander Argentina. Elena has contributed to a variety of publications including La Nación, Arte al Dia, Revista Jennifer, PAC. As a student, her professors Rafael Cippolini, Maria Gainza, Alicia de Arteaga and Claudio Iglesias have guided her into the path of writing about arts. Alongside writing, she curated and co-curated exhibitions in Calvaresi Contemporáneo, MNCARS, and Bolsa de Comercio de Buenos Aires and contributed to editorial projects in Ivorypress as an intern.
