A sort ofIn early 2019, I started showing my resistance to femicide on a wall in Marseille. I chose A4 paper and black paint for my stand to keep it as simple as possible. In September of the same year, I launched the campaign first in Paris and then nationwide.
In January 2020, I started taking a controversial position on trans activism on Twitter. In short, I think being a woman is a material reality, not a feeling. Even with a lot of will and physical mutilation, I believe that no man becomes a woman and vice versa. Since then, I have been plagued by harassment, threats, physical attacks at feminist demonstrations, and at the height of it, the so-called cancellation culture. In short, I was canceled. We also have a lot of words expressed in French.
The Cannes Film Festival is taking place and I heard that Marie Perenes and Simon Depardon will be putting out a film called antifeminist [Feminist Riposte], which forms part of the official selection. This documentary depicts a portrait of the “collage (woman) person”/”collage person”. Those Claiming Ownership of My Creation: A Collage Against Femicide.
Thanks to the official description, the director’s interview, and my own communication with a producer, I realized I didn’t mention it anywhere. I definitely have this problem. I hope I’m not erased from history because there are so many women before me. I represent truth by refusing to attribute my creation to others. Obliterating me is pure, shameless revisionism.
When I am asked how I came up with the idea of condemning femicide by drawing black letters on A4 paper, I usually take a deep breath and my brain gets confused because I know I should answer briefly, Drop a punchline. And a punchline like that will never come. I can’t explain how I came up with this idea in less than 10 minutes.
I cannot and will not tolerate being erased from history
It incorporates many inspirations. At first, I can think about the paintings of Pierre Soulages, the aesthetic shock I feel when I see the white parts of his paintings cut into black parts. This is the trajectory of his tools. I could also think about the women’s movement, my love of typography, and how we as women occupy public spaces. I should also mention the ambition to think at scale for women, how to breathe life into an entire group. This is what Ina Shevchenko taught me.
I really try to be concise because this is an opinion piece, not a table of contents, but it’s been years in the making; the simplest ideas tend to turn out to be the longest.
But it doesn’t get more complicated than this: I cannot and will not tolerate being erased from history by publishing houses and documentary production companies that make money and expand their audiences by using — theft – My creations. I can’t stand the hijacking of this creation, originally intended to combat femicide and domestic violence, being hijacked by women who are deemed entitled to take over my aesthetic to make collages like “We don’t want to count dead (wo) men”, “Pootriarchy”, “Let’s Burn TERFS”.
TERF is for women like me: refusing to say “menstruating” when referring to endometriosis. Those who refuse to include men disguised as women into spaces that may remain non-mixed, such as locker rooms, prisons, and shelters for abused women. TERF is among those who condemn surgery and the administration of hormones to healthy bodies because they portend health scandals. We are often attacked and humiliated: eggs are thrown at us During the demonstrations, we were harassed online, casually received death threats, and were treated downright rude. All in all, we are the new witches.
In France, some of us are labeled with this acronym; we hate it because it is systematically used as an insult against us. Dora Moutot created the first large audience community on Instagram dedicated to heterosexual female sexuality, and she suffered more or less the same amount of revenge I did. Her turnover has dropped by a third in the past two years because she refuses to say “people with vulva”.
Pauline Makoveitchoux was the first photographer to document the beginnings of the collage movement in Paris, and her exhibition Virty-sur-Seine (Women Are Not Afraid) was marred by not being “inclusive” – in other words, she refused to be included in Men disguised as women in her work. All her requests for public funding to make a collage against femicide were denied. “TERF” is not welcome in Cannes.
So far, I’ve been dealing with a pain that many of us share: 220,000 women in France are victims of domestic violence every year. The collective “partner or ex-femicide” keeps counting the number of people killed every two or three days. The government has not taken any relevant measures.
The pain is exacerbated when I see my creation being twisted and hijacked by people who have access to it “The Poor”.
Too many women are invisible; it has to stop
I can also mention the pain I felt when the book was published Notre colère sur vos murs [“Our anger on your walls”], posted by Denoel I’ve been suing. Its back cover suggests that the anti-femicide collage popped up, leading to the belief that it had nothing to do with me. For now, I’m going to have to go through the fact that a movie about my creation, antifeministdid not mention me either.
My pain can’t stop growing. It’s heartfelt because it explains the pain of the creator whose work has been absurdly copied; it’s ideological because I can’t stand my contribution to women’s history being erased in my lifetime. and meet the needs of men.
This erasure is both voluntary and political. It’s inherent in the ideology of transactivism, and it handles censorship and journalistic speech deftly: it’s about changing the definition of the word “woman”, forcibly removing it to help people like “menstruating people” Dehumanizing expression. Transgender people are very good at obliterating women. This is their trademark.
That’s why I decided to take responsibility. I authorize my lawyers, Ms. Ermeline Serre and Mr. Ivan Terel, to use all legal means, including judicial means, against those who create what I believe to be parasitic on my work – originally dedicated to abused women – always be Those people slandered or obliterated me. Too many women are hidden. It has to stop.
This article is translated from original in French.
