EDEN
BERNAL
Exiles/The Siren Song
A trans-media project
Exiles/The Siren Song is a trans-media project about four women who decided to move away from their husbands and form the society in order to break with the constant violence they suffered and to find the freedom that, due to its gender, was denied to them.
The process of making this project involved the use of different media –photography, video, text and drawing–, and took different forms –a photo exhibition, a photobook, a short and a feature film–, that constitute a body of work whose elements interact with each other and whose narrative weaves different stories, link unconnected horizons and make metaphors about central issues for women in Mexico: the violence against them, the lack of respect for their right to self-determination, and the need to break with the social constraints that gender implies.
Description
Made up of two books that are interspersed and remain united on a cardboard cover. When the photobook opened, the pages compose a panoramic frame on which the images, from one side and the other, are completed or establish relationships with each other. Thus, the passing of the pages is used as a tool to collide vanishing lines and establish relationships by contact, but at a distance; but above all, to construct a narrative whose flow involves the physical movement of the viewer, who when unfolding the book, penetrates little by little into the landscape and into the protagonist’s stories.
Synopsis
At the middle of her life, Bertha let her husband to leave and decided to raise her children by herself. In the midst of nature she forged an own territory and an identity that breaked their land’s feminine stereotype. Now, at the age of 80, despite the havocs of elderness, she tried to continue living in the place and doing the job where she found freedom.