Choose your own (dis) adventure with the help of Mujeres Públicas
Posted February 22, 2009 by bec_young in Reviews
Review:
Elige Tu Propia Desventura: La Increíble y Triste Historia de una Cualquiera de Nosotras
(Choose your own dis-adventure: the incredible and sad story of any one of us)
Mujeres Públicas, 2008
While in Buenos Aires I met with one of the women in the feminist art collective Mujeres Públicas, which has been reclaiming public space for six years. They often combat sexism by creating posters and wheat pasting them to advertisements, or printing stickers. I noticed that they recently started a blog, which lists an event they held at the end of January with 28 participants, in which the subject of birth control was addressed in a hands-on workshop!
Amid one of their brainstorming sessions, they came up with the idea of writing a book which would represent challenges women typically face in a Western, industrialized county, challenges which are largely invisible to men. They had the idea to make a book in which the readers control the journey through a series of choices about body image, sexual abuse, sexist encounters and depression. They decide to use the format of a "choose your own adventure" novel, which would cleverly reveal the limits to our "choices" in "free" societies.
After three years of work, the final result is a book that is well-written in a simple style that many different types of women may relate to, and the illustrations are charming. The most impressive thing about this book to me, however, is that it was written collectively by five women, whose lives are embedded in the stories of hope and despair. The cover image reveals their process; behind the image of the woman, a criss-cross of arrows links one situation and event to another. It was explained to me how they laid the paper out on the kitchen table and mapped out the stories of their lives - and the lives of their mothers and sisters - in scrawling text. Then, they linked these stories with dots and red arrows, and spent hours talking while scribbling out, erasing, and redrawing lines. The book is copy-left and self-published, and hopefully will someday be translated and printed in English to reach a wider audience. What's most inspiring is the idea that such an interesting book could be collaboratively written by a group of artists, a feat that is definitely worth repeating.
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