Domesticity

Claudia Agati

Documenting domestic abuse survivors through portraiture and personal objects.

In Claudia's own words:

Domesticity is a project about four women from very different backgrounds , who endured violent relationships within their homes.

Home is traditionally regarded as a romanticised place, a utopian and sacred site for refuge. This ideal private space hides a complete different reality, the one of whom has suffered and still suffers domestic violence. Home continues to be the place where women face violence the most. Each week in the UK, two women are killed by a partner or ex-partner. Anybody can find themselves in this situation, regardless of their ethnicity, class, gender, nationality or religion. women are more likely to experience domestic violence “because she is a woman and [...it...] happens disproportionately to women”.

In intimate relationships violence is rooted in the semantics of gender inequality: the ‘victimʼ, regardless of sex, is always feminized. With this project I wanted to challenge the notion of home as a safe space, to reveal the power dynamic therein and to show how our socially constructed vision of space, and in particular, domestic space can be a tool not just to reinforce gender inequality but can constitute an instrument of violence.

Our society on one hand punishes perpetrators and on the other reinforces those elements that are at the very base of domestic violence. For example, the reinforcement of binary contrapositions is the basis of a distorted patriarchal hierarchy that positions women in a submissive role.

These stories are about the power and control of one person over another and the central element of this project is to reaffirm the importance of womenʼs voices and the impact they can have to achieve a truly democratic society.

Ce N'est Pas Moi (It's not me)

Julia Blur

These intimate photographs of domestic spaces attempt to communicate the effects of patriarchal oppression experienced by Turkish women in a time of social and political change.

“To become the person someone else had imagined for us is not freedom - it is to mortgage our life to someone else’s fear.” - Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living

Julia describes the work herself:

Turkey has been a secular state during the last century. The changing sociopolitical climate has intensified its effects on each citizen over the course of last two decades. The women and their existential struggles have become even more invisible and inconspicuous. This work aims to create a feeling about contemporary womanhood focusing on the notion of oppression from patriarchal family and social structure. Through this image/text work, I try to communicate the effects of patriarchal oppression through intimate stories of two women, via turning the lens to their domestic spaces and belongings to create a composite emotional portrait along with their own words.

All Conceivable Freedoms

Nayara Leite

Burnt family photographs and audio recordings reconstruct the experiences of LGBTQ+ Brazilians turned away from their childhood homes.
Nayara interviewed each individual and their own words accompany the images.

“My mother judged me a lot. It was a tremendous emotional abuse, a pressure for heteronormativity. She said I could never have a family.”

“When my mother found out that I was gay, she started crying a lot and passed out. I took her to the hospital and, when we came back home, she asked me to leave. She didn’t want me living with her anymore, because she wouldn’t accept my sexuality. That was so painful for me. I could never imagine that my mother, my only family, would do that to me.”