Isto é o meu corpo (1979 / 2010)
Noémia Cruz
PT
Photography

“Isto é o meu corpo” (This is my body) has its origin in the photography of a politician, with his hands posed, captured during a congress of a Christian democrat party, during which radical-right-wing slogans were yelled out. It was 1979, and the fight for women emancipation was a core aspect of our and my everyday life: I could not help to approach it during her last year of my studies at the BA sculpture. Politic parties and Church were allied against women upraise: to disrupt the scene of the Last Supper, was my response. The formal conception of the piece occurred to me at the most improbable occasion: as paramedic technician, while assisting a doctor in the macroscopic exam of anatomic pieces. The doctor slices the breast as one slices bread: the bread is transfigured and Christ offers slices of a breast (mutilation of a body? or of desire itself?), but which is also a conventual desert. Ambiguity/subversion were installed: body as a votive object, but most of all as an object of desire? "This is my body", but whose body is this? Does it belong to woman, offered as a delicacy for a decadent society, but also as symbol of life and redemption? Or does it belong to Christ Himself, assuming a female figure?

“Isto é o meu corpo” was exhibited for the first time in 1979. One of the hands was stolen; was this an expression of disapproval or approval? In 1980 the piece gets partially destroyed during a fire in her studio. Re:made, thirty years after its conception, the piece is re:novated in a statement against the false moralism of a society emasculated by a huffy god, because Man became aware of his own sexuality, discovering eroticism and, hence, celebrating life in its entire grandness.

Noémia Cruz

Noémia Cruz was born in 2948 in Santana da Serra, Ourique.

In 1980 she finished her BA Sculpture at Escola Superior de Belas Artes de Lisboa. She teaches Visual Arts in primary education, since 1976. She takes part in collective exhibitions since 1977, and she exhibits her work individually since 1987. Today her work figures in private and public national collections. Between 1980 and 1998 she worked with the sculptor Jorge Vieira in projects of sculpture, and with this artist she followed and supported projects to promote drawing and sculpture, as well as the processes of materialization of her own work. She was artistic advisor of the Museu Jorge Vieira, between 1995 and 2003, and she also took part on the artistic direction of this museum, and of the Galeria Municipal dos Escudeiros – Beja. In 2001 she participated in the experimental workshop to build a salt glazed oven, at the Oficinas do Convento in Montemor-o-Novo.