DOCUM3NTA M

Text by curator Cristina Bejar

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What do women need to write good novels? "One answer: economic and personal independence, that is, a room of one's own." This last phrase gives the title to the book written in 1929 by Virginia Woolf, which has served as a pre-text to bring together 99 authors from different countries in this exhibition.

From a numerical list obtained by counting the number of times the word “but” appears in A Room of One's Own, an invitation was made for people from different disciplines and activities to propose a work with the sole premise of using the numbers provided, without Tell them about the background of the book or any additional information.

This is how visual artists, scientists, photographers, florists, dressmakers, blacksmiths, truck base checkers, etc., present their explorations around numbers, resulting in a variety of themes that cross issues such as landscape, violence , the playful, the dreamlike, feminisms, childhoods, migration, the pandemic, until returning to arithmetic.

The name of the exhibition: D0CUM3NTA M, comes from a reflection that Woolf shares in her writing, regarding the place that women had in society at the beginning of the 20th century. Although today different critical approaches have been made to her text, there are issues that continue to affect us women, as the writer herself said, “there are stories that each generation must tell again.”

D0CUM3NTA M refers to the feminine document, to the very action of documenting, documenting ourselves, historicizing ourselves, narrating ourselves; and why not, it also refers to the curatorial processes of the famous contemporary art exhibition in Kassel: documenta. 

Eme. M for woman, M for mother, M for menstruation, M as a visual representation of a pair of open legs as is usually associated with the idea of conceiving and giving birth.

D0CUM3NTA M seeks to question and decentralize ideas and concepts based on something as abstract as numbers. It is also a provocation and an invitation to be more empathetic people about the different realities of being a woman around the world. Almost 100 years since Virginia Woolf wrote this essay, there are so many things that still need to change for us...