Where it all started

The photo series, India, The Metaphor, is the result of my solo trip in this country in 2016. This trip was crucial to make me commit to fight gender inequality, a commitment that took shape with the project Voices of Women.

India

In India, I faced my own vulnerability as a woman. Such vulnerability was not unknown to me up until then. Nevertheless, an unfamiliar reality such as the one I found in India, made my own culture’s imperfections blatant to the point I could no longer ignore them.

While wandering in India I felt like I was observing a caricature of my own society, where all differences that separate us – color, smells and traditions – distorted and exaggerated a reality that, has always been there, but it never bothered me enough to make me reflect.

What is there to bother me?

In India I got annoyed with this idea of being a woman without having chosen it, and carry throughout life a cultural inherency that pushes us out and labels us as inferior. Ultimately, what bothered me the most was the burden of a culture which, in certain places, often denies us fundamental rights. Like the right to be free to choose who we want to be and how we want to live our lives. Being a woman means to carry a burden we did not choose to carry. A burden that can be heavier depending on the place one is born.

The positive side of vulnerability

On the other side, a vulnerability that brought me closer to women. In a hostile environment to the female figure, where not all men are reliable, I rediscovered women as allies. The women I found in this journey became my safe haven. With them, with just a look, we shared our fears, a call for help, life dreams suppressed by tradition and a painful “why?” Why do we still carry this burden? Why is society so evil to us? Why are women’s rights still difficult to understand in the XXI century? Why does women’s freedom trigger fear and reprisal?

Is my (your) culture that different from the one I encountered in India?

This is a photo series shoot in India, but it aims to illustrate a metaphor of the gender inequality that subsists all over the world. This is not intended to be a judgement of the India society. It merely intends to trigger in the observer an individual reflection about its own existence, wherever that is.

The photo series is currently being exhibited at La Ciudad Invisible, in Madrid Spain until the 8th April 2018.