A huge red vulva in the park, the provocation that is making Brazil argue

It is 33 meters high, 16 meters wide and 6 meters deep. It took the hands of over 40 men to model it to perfection on the hillock of Usina de Arte, an outdoor sculpture park near the Brazilian town of Água Preta, in the state of Pernambuco, 130 km south of the capital Recife.
Diva is the work of Land Art by the Brazilian artist Juliana Notari who is making the whole of Brazil talk. A feminist sculpture loved and at the same time aroused, considered by some to be an “emblem of modernity” and by others an obscenity to be definitively canceled.

A work that acquires a very special significance in a Brazil where Bolsonaro’s presidency makes sexism and misogyny deeply felt problems.

“Among so many rocks, in the middle of this dystopian year, I finally close 2020 with this work ready!”, Wrote the artist in the post in which he presents Diva on his Instagram profile. And he adds: «It was a long process, almost 11 months of persistence, coexistence and learning. In Diva, I use art to dialogue with issues that refer to the gender issue seen from a female perspective, combined with a worldview that investigates the relationship between nature and culture in our Western, phallocentric and anthropocentric society. These problems are becoming more and more urgent. After all, it will be by changing the perspective of our relationships between human and non-human that we will be allowed to live longer on this planet and in a less inequitable and catastrophic society ».

But if the subject itself may seem like an “artistic gimmick” to amaze and capture attention, it should be pointed out that it is not the first time that Juliana Notari draws inspiration from the female body to carry forward his own vision of art and the world. Diva, in this sense, can be understood as yet another stage of a long multi-year journey: already in 2012, in fact, with the work Spalt-me the artist had produced an opening in a wall, the shape of which recalled the female genital organ, a sort of “wound” which was then penetrated with a hand. And even earlier, in 2006, its Performace Dra-Diva it was similar in form and manner, in this case also making use of bovine blood scattered around the slit.

In the face of the numerous negative comments that expressed negativity and disappointment for the sculpture, there were just as many that expressed great approval. The Brazilian journalist Daniela Name, for example, wrote that Juliana Notari’s gigantic vagina “merges the feminine with the earth, two types of fertility, highlighting how the generating power of the woman’s body goes far beyond motherhood”. The poet Cida Pedrosa, one of the most appreciated in the country, instead defined it as a “beautiful and urgent” work, adding that aggressive reactions are nothing but “a mirror of our delay”.