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  • Writer's pictureDeborah Scaggion

Clemence Vazard: Art and Gender Politics

To celebrate the International Women's Day, we interviewed Clemence Vazard, an artist who is challenging stereotypes and creating new narratives for women.


clemence vazard 2019 international women's day artist
Credits: Clemence Vazard

This week marks the International Women’s Day, and not only we want to celebrate women through art, we also want to celebrate those women who make art.


For this occasion, we had the chance to interview Clemence Vazard, a brilliant sound and visual artist from France. Her artworks, while exploring gender stereotypes, also aim at creating new narratives of femininity, giving a voice to women themselves.

She is mostly known for her project #monpremierharcelement, but recently she launched a new series entitled « Sois belle et tais-toi » (in English: « Be pretty and shut up»), which is inspired by a personal experience. Last year, after a holiday, she decided to stop wearing make-up every day, and this choice that allowed her to see herself without filters or masks. Now, she started a series and a social media campaign, to inspire other women to do the same. Under the slogan «Be you and speak up!», she challenges the stereotypical vision that the cosmetics industry and the social medias impose on women, which require them to be thinner, whiter and younger in order to be “beautiful”.


During our interview, we had the chance to chat with Clemence starting from her artworks, which suddenly became visual tools to understand her personality and visions.


 

Most of your artworks are united by their ability to challenge stereotypes and conventional representations of women. What are your sources of inspiration? Did any personal experience influence you?


I started my art practice by making collages. Magazines and illustrated books were a fabulous resource to explore media representations and the imagery we are force-fed with, and they were very affordable materials! When I was 12 years old, I would create huge murals from wallpapers, at the back of which I stuck pages of advertisement from women magazines. This, was the first research-based practice on women representations in the media. Later, as a teenager, I was striving to know what was waiting for me when I’ll be a woman, but I was very disappointed by the stereotypes and the reductive image of femininity that the media offered me. Consequently, I started to stick together paradoxical images in order to deconstruct women stereotypes and to reconstruct a powerful story of femininity. As Simone de Beauvoir said, «on ne naît pas femme, on le devient» («We are not born women, we become»): as a woman-to-be, this could have been my mantra for the process I engaged in while building my own identity.


Indeed, you often talk about how your art aims at creating new narratives and role models for women today. Which are the characteristics of these new role models? And how do you imagine the ‘women of tomorrow’?


What I want as an artist, is to ask those questions that are never asked or to which women are never given the rights or the opportunities to respond. With my artworks, and with the participative processes I created to engage women to reclaim their own stories, I wish to build an authentic, strong, and empowering history of feminism. And differently from what I had to do for myself, I hope that the generations to come will not have to deconstruct stereotypes to build their identities as women. The role models I created, or rather, that I highlighted, are resilient women who have succeeded in making obstacles their strengths. I would name Louise Brooks as a role model to me: she was abused at age nine, yet she became a great dancer and actress even if she got fired from a company because she was too ambitious. She then played in 25 movies and became an icon of resilient women, and an example for all women who did not identify with the gender codes of their time.

Every woman can be a resilient woman: we have no choose to fight every day and overcome obstacles to make our voices heard. So, to me, the women of tomorrow are right in front of our eyes. The young generation is much more aware of gender issues and speak up more regularly about sorority, ecofeminism and intersectionality. I think we need to partner, rather than fighting each other, if we want to make big changes!


Your series #monpremierharcelement provide a very unique and intimate view of a delicate topic like harassment. After the raise of movements like #metoo, and on the base of your personal experience with victims, do you think that society has finally created a safe space to debate this topic? Or is there still something that need to be said/asked?


When I started to work on this harassment project (even before the #metoo movement), most people did not take this cause seriously. Some of them told me that it was not even an issue, and that it concerned only a limited number of women, and so on. But, from my own experience, I knew it was not true.

When I started to speak about my first harassment story, that was 10 years after it happened. At the time, nobody really listened to me the way I would have want to be heard, I buried this story until I felt I had to tell it! So, I finally started to tell this story to my girlfriends straight away and not only they believed me without any doubts, but they also started to share similar stories with me. Every time I was telling this story, I was then hearing so many more new stories of ordinary sexism in the workplace, of sexual assault within the family, or of street harassment that had just happened. I felt that somehow, I had to record this . After my first #monpremierharcelement exhibition, launched in Paris in September 2017, the Weinstein case came up and #metoo and #timesup movements made a lot of noise. People started to realize what I was talking about. And I even had a grant from Paris 18th district City Hall for this project!


However, this is just the beginning of a new era. As with the French Revolution, once the Bastille was taken, a new order had to be built, and it takes time and energy. #metoo opened the door and we have a lot of issues to speak about now. However, on French news, we recently heard about Denis Baupin, the BRI rapists and the Ligue du LOL: these and many other cases, show how the impunity of a patriarchal mentality still imposes itself. What gives me hope, however, is the proof of the power of speaking up in these cases. Those women (and sometimes men) who had the courage to speak up and to denounce both the harassers and the system of patriarchal domination in which we live, contributed to make the truth being heard and amplified the massive awareness that #metoo was the spark. We are still far from the bonfire, but the wind of revolution is blowing over the embers of emancipation.


Let’s move to one of your latest projects, Visual Diet: a campaign and exhibition, that shade a light on the dangers of the daily overconsumption of 'toxic' contents on social media. How did the social media change the relationship of women with themselves and their bodies? And did they affect your artistic process and/or the way you communicate with the public?


When Marine Tanguy, the founder of MTArt Agency, told me about the whole Visual Diet project, I felt that I had to use this platform to give young women the opportunity to speak up about their experiences with social media, and the impact it had on their mental health. Actually, that is a substantial issue, that is not enough discussed, and on which there is a big taboo, specifically because social media users feel the need to communicate only positively their lives and look, and have to look perfect, objectifying themselves. This phenomenon, affects young women the most, because they are particularly vulnerable on their body appearances. But a debate just began thanks to the Visual Diet campaign.

For this project, I created a sound artwork called "Hey Siri, why don’t I look like that girl on Instagram?” Here, I collected testimonies from young women who shared their experiences with social media and transformed them into Siri female voices. The depersonalization of these women's intimate stories through synthetic voices, echoes the filtered images, retouched selfies and over-played scenes that we scroll ‘en masse’ every day on social media. What I am creating with these artworks is a free speech platform, where social media victims can speak out, and finally tell the truth about their struggles and suffering.


As to my relationship with social media, being an artist, I think it is pretty healthy, as I use it to get in touch with my community and to give women a voice.



Finally, your upcoming project, will see #monpremierharcelement being presented at Euston Village during the MAKE SPACE Festival, which aims at relaunching the neighbourhood in London, making creative use of unused spaces. This experience will see you both in the shoes of an artist and in that of a speaker: so, how important do you think it is for an artist to build a direct relationship with people? And is it hard to reach out to women?


During #monpremierharcelement exhibition in London, I will be running a workshop for women in the Euston Town community, and then I will travel abroad, inviting them over to share their experiences. In fact, my art process is mainly participative, and I constantly meet women to chat about these topics: I need to build a direct relationships with people, for my art to be honest and powerful. It may be hard sometimes to reach out women on subjects that they are not used to talk about, but as women, we have a lot to say that must be heard, and a lot to share for history to be rewritten.


D.S.


Credits Cover Image: Clemence Vazard

We thanks Clemence Vazard and MTArt Agency for their support in creating this article.

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