Feminism, art and injustice

In her exhibition entitled

La Vuitena Arma

, the plastic artist Marga Ximenez proposed a profound reflection on the female condition in the face of life and death.

To achieve this, the Catalan artist placed a series of textile manipulations throughout the room.

In his own words, the origin of this montage owed its inspiration to the birth simulator used by the midwife Madame du Coudray (1712-1794) at the end of the 18th century.

The mannequin that Madame du Coudray devised - known as

The Machine

- was made of wood, cardboard, cloth and cotton, and consisted of an exact reproduction of the pelvis of a woman during childbirth.

In addition, it had another mannequin that represented a newborn, as well as a placenta and an umbilical cord.

Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray was a pioneer woman in the history of science for teaching the art of childbirth.

Her office as a midwife would lead her to be recognized by Louis XV himself, who awarded her the title of midwife teacher and a lifetime pension.

But the king did not do it out of humanism, but out of interests.

Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray was a pioneer woman in the history of science for teaching the art of childbirth

It must be remembered that after the Seven Years' War - an international conflict that took place between the beginning of 1756 and the end of 1763 - the French army was reduced.

Therefore, the interest of Louis XV was none other than to repopulate the army and, for this, to raise the birth rate, he counted on the office of midwives.

With the training of midwives, the birth rate was assured, as many babies died at the time of delivery due to ignorance of the technique.

Without going any further, the Marquis de La Fayette was one of many who owed his coming into the world to Madame du Codray.

However, the office of Madame du Codray did not distinguish social classes.

He toured peasant France, giving training courses, explaining in a simple way the process of childbirth with the help of

the machine

.

Because childbirth is an art that can only be learned by practicing it, and Madame du Codray put aside theories that only came to hinder such a crucial moment as the arrival of a child into the world.

'La Vuitena Arma' is an exhibition made from different volumes and textures.

Its purpose was to achieve a visual metaphor where the imaginary term was identified with sexual violence against women at different times.

The only copy of this ingenious birthing simulator is exhibited in the Flaubert Museum of the History of Medicine in Rouen (France), a place dedicated to the memory of the father of the writer who worked as a surgeon.

It was during one of the visits to the museum, when Marga Ximenez had the inspiration to make

La Vuitena Arma

, an exhibition made from different volumes and textures.

Its purpose was to achieve a visual metaphor where the imaginary term was identified with sexual violence against women at different times.

In this way, the aggression that mutilates and marks has its origin in a mannequin that, at the time, served to teach how to give life.

In these times of feminism and prohibitions, it is worth looking back and recovering the birth artist who was Madame du Coudray and, of course, Marga Ximenez, who with her montage alludes to a chilling episode of the war of Timor (1999), where, according to witnesses, a dozen pregnant women were slit open from the throat to the belly to tear out the unborn and then smash them against stones.

A brutal episode that led Marga Ximenez to use the mannequin created by Madame du Codray to denounce violence against women in an exhibition that took place in Barcelona, ​​at La Xina ART, at the beginning of the century.

Another example of how art uses science to denounce injustices.

The stone ax

is a section where

Montero Glez

, with the will of prose, exercises his particular siege to scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.

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