The Decent Women from Calle 58 - for the Sake of our Children
This exhibition is about daily life as it is for a group of Mexican women in a specific street. Their work has the purpose of supporting the life of their children. The Danish anthropologist Christian Heilskov Rasmussen initiated the project which has as it's aim to reach one step further than to the traditional stigmatizing usually following prostitutes.
Some hold that sex workers are ‘selling their body'’, yes even their soul. No wo don't! We are selling a service for which some men are paying. To provide food and clothes for our children, the women’s answers are.
To all the women, of who three were born as male, Christian Heilskov Rasmussen explained his interest in their story and their portrait. For each interview he paid the price for one service. Of course, because they were at work. He could take their photographed portrait with and without clothes if he promised not to make them accessible on the internet. Except for one woman, Rosario, who poses on a photograph 6 month pregnant trying to take of her briefs. At another one she sits with the new born baby surrounded by her other children. Today she is a chauffeur driving trucks - those with a large hanger. .
22 drawings by well acknowledged Mexican artist Gabriel Ramírez and 30 embroidered portraits by Mexican textile artist Elena Martínez-Bolio are based on the mentioned photographs, but the model are not recognizable. Those two artists in this way become a part of a tradition in art history of visual artist using prostitutes as their models.
Christian Heilskov Rasmussen explains: ”The beautiful embroidery and the drawings are mirrors of a hard social existence. They show a group of women, who earn to the daily living as prostitutes, in Mexico named 'putas' - in Denmark 'luder' (whore). The portraits and the women’s own words are taken for at street in the town Mérida. Nobody is minor age or trafficked.”
This is the first presentation of the exhibition in Denmark. Earlier it has been shown at the art museum MACAY in Mérida (2012), at the textile museum in Oaxaca (2013) and in 2014 at the catholic university museum in León, all in Mexico.
”The Decent Women from Calle 58 – for the sake of our children" is on show September 17 - December 11, 2016, at the Art Centre Silkeborg Bad.