Las hijas
de Minerva
2024
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Minerva’s Daughters is a collaborative project developed with Alejandría Cinque and commissioned by PhotoEspaña. The project was designed as a site-specific intervention for the Museum of Romanticism in Madrid, focusing on the role of women in European Romanticism. After multiple visits to the museum, we chose to center the work around its billiard room, using it as the core element to shape and articulate the project.
Collaboration project with Alejandría Cinque
In a bourgeois Romantic house, the billiards room was a space meant for male sociability. Only the men played, while the women watched the match, quietly seated around them. This segmentation by gender was symbolically reproduced by the Museum itself by hanging a gallery of period women’s portraits on the walls surrounding the billiard table.
Beyond the evolution in Romantic ladies’ fashions, this small gesture also updates the collection’s discourse and brings the gender issue into the present. This issue is essential in the project that Laura San Segundo and Alejandría Cinque have planned to engage in dialogue with this unique space, as well as with the ideology of an era of which we are still the heirs.
Minerva’s Daughters is an installation- and performance-based photography project in which several players figuratively play a billiards match. Through different actions—from the uniforms worn and the transformation of the watching into an active exercise to the mythological figure of Minerva as the narrative and conceptual thread that constructs and directs the players—the match becomes a battlefield to struggle for the emancipation from that corporeality associated with nineteenth-century femininity.
Exhibition organized by the National Museum of Romanticism (Ministry of Culture) and PhotoEspaña. In collaboration with Fujifilm España and Casanova Foto.