SATURDAY 8 | Photographer Mona Simon and writer/gender expert Cova Alvarez rethink what has made us as we are and why in The Skin Code Project, a new exhibition which questions what we consider ‘normal’. The project creates a sonority place in which female protagonists can tell their own stories out loud, for the first time in many cases. “Our personal pathways are engraved in our skins: colours, marks, wrinkles or cracks that break through without us being able to avoid it, while scars establish basic coordinates and we use ink to draw ourselves or choose other ways to embody our destinies,” say the pair. “Our skin contains the glances of the others, glances that can sculpt us in a way that can become a corset. In this sense, and as women, we were interested in identifying if there is something related to our female designation and the experiences we have lived through our women’s skins that can mark certain patterns, possibilities, restrictions or expectations about our personal pathways and in our encounters with ourselves and others. John Berger said that a conversation could be a sort of sculpture. There are words that can destroy us and there are others that can lighten our heart. Sometimes they are the same words and it depends on the skin we choose to inhabit, and on that other skin we can save from the flames. Through meetings and conversations with 20 women from Cambodia and other countries, to revisit their individual itineraries and land in the vision of themselves in this present moment, their portraits emerge.”
WHO: Mona Simon and Cova Alvarez
WHAT: The Skin Code Project exhibition
WHERE: Tepui @ Chinese House, Sisowath Quay & Street 84
WHEN: March 8
WHY: An artistic homage to the fairer sex on International Women’s Day