origin

Iron Mask – White Torture focuses on the subject of female migration before the background of Europe’s postcolonial history. The chief protagonist of this installation is a figure with a big following throughout Latin America—the slave girl named Anastácia. Legend has it that her owner sentenced her to lifelong silence constrained in an iron gag. She is venerated as a rebel, as a fighter in the abolition movement, as a woman who resisted the sexual violence of her colonial master, and as an innocent martyred servant of God.

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Marissa Lôbo, artist and activist on behalf of the rights of Blacks and immigrants, regards Anastácia, a woman whom racist and sexist power relations sentenced to silence, as a figure of great current relevance. In Lôbos interpretation, Anastácia resists the symbolic violence of being forced into the role of victim, object, museum exhibit and icon. She has the penetrating look of someone who sees, and in doing so focuses intense and revealing eyes on colonialism and its perpetrators.