Wynnie Mynerva

I see my work as the echo of a furious collectivity that refuses to accept patriarchal fantasies and heterosexual paradises shaped by the standard. My early sculptural research on genital anatomies ('The Other Sex', 2018) was the beginning of an exploration of the political possibilities of the dildo to undo heterosexual contracts). My next project was a reckoning with institutionalised misogyny and male authority ('Sweet Castrator', 2020), painting a series of landscapes where stalkers and predators find themselves persecuted and besieged. Always charged with autobiographical components, my work gives rise to the urgency of confronting impunity as well as the structure of racial, sexual and class violence that define the contours of the different forms of patriarchal violence.

For my fifth solo 'Closing to Open' I presented a video of my surgical intervention together with a series of paintings on transparent acrylic build a scene of celebration, joy and exaltation that activates questions about the body and self-determination. I had to learn to read the medical discourse – the rhetoric of gender dysphoria, the protocols of sexual reassignment, etc. – to manage a change to which I aspired. My efforts are close to the struggles that various transgender communities have been waging, with whom I share spaces and intimacy. Aware of their privileges, and breaking the bubble that usually sees art as separate from life, my aim was to claim surgery not as a servant of the norm but as an agent of desire: as a tool to achieve a body with which I felt represented.