Being Anastacia 2006
Goethe Institute, Salvador, Brazil
A project in Brazil on the legendary slave Anastasia, who was punished to death with an iron mask on her mouth for voicing against her master.
Exploration of violence and repression: whether gendered, nationalist, or structural. Being Anastacia 2006 explored how the weight of silence is enforced by invisible masks, through gaps between coloniser and colonised, heretical and sacred, and ultimately between official history and un-official (but celebrated) her-story. suggesting the tentative nature of visibility and invisibility of our bindings and also signaling a retrieval of dignity, history, and sense of self––all that which was subject to annihilation by the gendered and epistemic violence of colonialism on body, psyche, and culture.
