My body knows unheard songs, the flesh says the truth, I am spacious flesh that sings

Ingrid Guardiola and Marta Segarra (LEGS-CNRS and ADHUC-Universitat de Barcelona) are the curators of the exhibition and the cycle of activities "My body knows unheard songs, the flesh says the truth, I am spacious flesh that sings: a research on gender, monstrosities and becoming other". This exhibition and the activities that accompany it are part of collective research on cultural issues linked to identity and gender based on work on the body and abnormality, that is to say, on those "radical alterities" that question the norms, the figurations and what is expected of a body. Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (ADHUC-Universitat de les Illes Balears), the writer Hélène Cixous, the dancer Núria Guiu and Maria Isern (poet and predoctoral researcher at ADHUC), among others,  will participate in the events.

In 1975, Hélène Cixous published one of the most cited texts in feminist criticism, The Laugh of the Medusa, in which she vindicates the mythological figure of the monstrous woman or that woman who, for the mere fact of not following aesthetic norms or morals of the time has been turned into a monster. In popular culture, femininity (or non-adherence to gender binarism) has always been related to monstrosity, for example that of "bad mothers", or that of witches, or that of the bestial woman, all of them incarnations of the irrational that male fear has been projecting throughout history.

Currently, the emphasis that feminisms place on the body and sexuality, as well as the rise of criticism of traditional humanism, which is often described as "posthumanist", have once again put the female monster at the center of the debate. These monstrous figures are represented as hybrids, half-animals or cyborgs, but, instead of appearing as terrifying creatures, they are read as a possibility to escape the dictatorship of normativity, and also as an occasion for the deployment of inner life.

The exhibition is born from a philosophical genealogy that interweaves feminism, posthumanism, xenomysticism and the politics of desire, which try to think about what a body can and cannot do beyond Spinoza's famous phrase. The artists who are part of the exhibition present research on what happens when we become "other", or are put in the place of the female other. The exhibition is a choral song about the vital and creative possibilities when women's bodies leave the place that society has assigned them and where what is prioritized is not so much the question of "who I am" but "what I become”.