Kikí Roca, Las Chicas del Chancho y el Corpiño

Using gendered irony and humor against patriarchal power has a long tradition in the history of feminist politics, blending domestic references with social commentary and carnivalesque aesthetics in engaged artistic practices. The absent body is a charged signifier in the state rhetoric of “disappearance” used to cover up the murders of political opponents during Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976–1983). In the post-dictatorship era, the absent female body in El Corpiño, a realistic rendition of a monumental brassiere realized by a female collective led by Cristina “Kikí” Roca, acts as a cipher for national politics from Córdoba, a city with its own long history of resistance against the dictatorship in Argentina, ranging from the University Reform of 1919 (led by the artist’s grandfather, Deodoro Roca) to the decisive civil uprising El Cordobazo in 1969.

The artists’ tongue-in-cheek response (“Until when...”) to a masculinist statement by the then-provincial Governor (“...we have to put out our chests...”) is written onto a tag dangling between the bra’s two cups. It operates as a gender reversal (female breasts in lieu of a male chest) and a critique within the context of corruption-induced economic downturn, against the backdrop of broader calls for reparative justice by the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Disappeared on Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo. Thirty years after its first reveal in public space, what will the transferal of its scaled-up version from one of Córdoba’s main political stages to the indoor space of a public art institution in Berlin evoke and provoke—especially in light of Kikí Roca’s statement: “Today, interventions are already institutionalized, as is the discussion of art and politics with its spaces on the Web, forums, and seminars, which show a different scenario from that time”?

Text: Claire Tancons