The work aims to promote a reflection on how video performance and photography can be vectors for questioning the representation of the female body in our society – a society that is marked by machismo and built on patriarchal principles.
The research studies how women’s naked bodies prompt viewers to question gender inequality, modesty, desire, and the consequences of the construction of female stereotypes and their relationships to gender inequalities and the power dynamics between masculine and feminine. The research aims to understand how the female body is considered sacred and unclean.
For this, I use the four elements of nature as my main source of inspiration:
Water, air, earth, fire, a natural cycle that I try to denaturalise.
The objective is to highlight the duality between natural and non-natural, between what is considered natural and what is considered monstrous.
The body is used as the main subject to question its representations, but also to make a discovery of itself and its imagination.
The imagination of the other is part of the construction of this work.
To what extent does our imagination contribute to reinforcing violent acts?
I leave the answers to others.
I use my body as an opening for dialogue.
The mutilation of the body is an element, and perhaps a central one, of my performances. It is through the boundaries between fear, modesty, shame, and denial that I weave my speech. Faced with the beautiful and tragic spectacle of fragility confronted with destruction.
Biography
Leticia Zica (1994) grew up in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The camera was by her side since she was a teenager. At age 14 she did her first self-portraits and since there she continued in the world of photography, exploring themes such as feminism, the surrealist movement and the brazilian culture.
At 18, she moves to Sao Paulo to study fashion design. She worked as a freelance photographer and gallery assistant for the prestigious Leica Gallery Sao Paulo, where she contributed with photographers such as Ralph Gibson, Bruce Gilden, Andy Summers, Alain Laboile and Julian Lennon.
Her works has been exhibited in different parts of the world, such as the Bogota Museum of Contemporary Art, the Month of Photography Los Angeles, Tiradentes Photography Festival, Les Rencontres d’Arles, among others.
She was a judge member for the Antiparos Photography Festival in Greece.
She is the official photographer for Maison Mère, a 4 starts hotel in Paris and collaborates with Clichés Urbains with educational photographic programs. She currently studies her master degree in Photography at Paris 8 university and lives in Paris, France.