{"id":20720,"date":"2019-09-26T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-26T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/?p=20720"},"modified":"2020-10-20T15:01:04","modified_gmt":"2020-10-20T13:01:04","slug":"white-dresses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/society\/feminism\/white-dresses\/","title":{"rendered":"White dresses"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Wedding Dress<\/a> by Christo and Jeanne-Claude<\/a> was exhibited from March 23 to June 2, 2019, at the au Yves Saint-Laurent Museum Marrakech<\/a> as part of the Christo: Women 1962 \u2013 1968<\/em> retrospective. Taken in 1967, the photo shows a woman tethered to a heap of objects wrapped in fabric that she attempts to drag behind her. The image recalls La Mari\u00e9e (Eva Maria)<\/a> sculpted by Niki de Saint-Phalle<\/a> in 1963, a woman choked by a plaster dress embedded with disjointed doll parts and other children\u2019s toys. Head tilted to one side, eyes empty, she embodies women\u2019s sacrifice, their submission to a value system, condemned to start a family and often forced into marriage like in the \u201cChild Brides<\/a>\u201d series by photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair<\/a>. In 2012, she obtained the Visa d\u2019Or for her photo essay on young girls \u2013 in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, India, Nepal or Yemen \u2013 sold by their families to much older men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dress worn by Marie-Ange Guilleminot<\/a> in her 1994 performance The Marriage of Saint-Maur to Saint-Gallen<\/em> is actually weighed down by lead rosary beads so that anyone who lifts it can literally feel its weight and move it only with difficulty. This fake marriage is celebrated aboard a plane flying her from one man to the next. In some countries, marriage is nothing more than transferring a woman from one authority (her father\u2019s) to another (her husband\u2019s), materialized in the payment of a \u201cbride price\u201d, another name for dowry in Sub-Saharan Africa or Kirghizstan, where it is current practice to abduct the person one wishes to marry. In Guilleminot\u2019s trousseau? A book of handkerchiefs embroidered with Pierre Giquel poems on solitude and absence, much like the dress which, worn a single time, is left hanging to express the body\u2019s absence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Absence of the body and sometimes, of consent. In April 2016, 31 wedding dresses made of fabric, lace and paper, are hung by the Lebanese organization ABAAD along the Beirut promenade to protest an archaic law: Article 522 of the Lebanese penal code on rape, aggression, abductions and marriage which states that a rapist can avoid prison if he accepts to marry his victim. 31 dresses void of bodies, 31 like the days in a month, because every day at least one woman suffers the consequences of this law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it comes down to it, probably Pippa Bacca<\/a>\u2019s performance best illustrates the symbolic shift in the white dress. In 2008, the Italian artist undertakes a journey to Jerusalem, hitchhiking or walking there in a wedding dress. Her process comes from a desire to bring a message of peace. She departs from Milan on May 8, the international day for women\u2019s rights, before being raped and murdered one month later in Turkey. All that remains is a dress and a camcorder. Based on the images recovered from the camera, which Pippa Bacca used to document her journey, French filmmaker and artist Jo\u00ebl Curtz<\/a> creates La Mari\u00e9e<\/em> (2012). Two years before that, Turkish filmmaker Bing\u00f6l Elmas<\/a> directs the documentary My Letter to Pippa,<\/em> in which Elmas dons a black dress and completes the journey begun by the Italian artist. Finally, in 2018, French novelist Nathalie L\u00e9ger<\/a> publishes La robe blanche <\/em>(The White Dress<\/em>), intertwining Pippa Bacca\u2019s macabre fate with the daily violence committed against women, starting with her own mother, in an attempt to, as Marie-Ange Guilleminot writes about her piece V\u00eatements blancs<\/em> \u2013 created out of the victims\u2019 clothing preserved in the Hiroshima Peace Museum \u2013 \u201cperpetuate a memory until the very limits of oblivion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cover<\/strong>: Photo published on the site for the Lebanese organization ABAAD in 2016 during their \u201cA White Dress Doesn\u2019t Cover the Rape\u201d campaign.<\/strong>
Translation by Maya Dalinsky<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Wedding Dress by Christo and Jeanne-Claude was exhibited from March 23 to June 2, 2019, at the au Yves Saint-Laurent Museum Marrakech as part of the Christo: Women 1962 \u2013 1968 retrospective. Taken in 1967, the photo shows a woman tethered to a heap of objects wrapped in fabric that she attempts to drag<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101027,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1847],"tags":[1849],"corpus":[],"post_types":[1329],"associate_editors":[],"authors":[1598],"class_list":["post-20720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-society","tag-feminism","post_types-chronique-en","authors-camille-reynaud-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101027"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20720\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20720"},{"taxonomy":"corpus","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/corpus?post=20720"},{"taxonomy":"post_types","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_types?post=20720"},{"taxonomy":"associate_editors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/associate_editors?post=20720"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=20720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}