Women are allies. When there are women in a group, you, either as a man or as a woman, are safe – safe from toxic masculinity, sexual and gender-based violence, abuse, sorrow and depression. They establish a place, a tiny place that nourishes your freedom, your wishes turned into tragic comedy, your smile and your deviousness. After all, there is always deviance as long as there is a norm – heteronormativity, the gender archetype, the stereotype by which society as a whole is governed.

dividing,

shelving,

taxonomizing.

A woman is a free and self-governing weapon, both an instrument and a lethal organism equipped with individuation. In your lukewarm existence, as you float through a daft and unguarded adolescence because you are a soft and weak male, the woman takes your place. She swings her clutch with tenacity, with her rings clenched into fists, with the deafening screech of a harpy, with a high heel poised to stab the eye of the enemy. And that foe is every man who does not know how to be a woman, who does not want to be a woman, not even for a lousy second because he wants to keep his integrity undamaged and because he, unaffected by the differences between other bodies, is failing to achieve that increasingly rare thing: to feel empathy, because

bros b4 hoes,

always,

always.

Always.

Meme note: anything is a weapon, as long as used properly. And women know it.

Nothing is sacred about a woman. All romance literature is a lie, a visual, erotic, textual and contextual male decoy. All romantic poetry is a trap, with a few exceptions – those would be much more modern and realistic than platonic, nostalgic and rapturous. However, this does not mean that all the female myths are untrue, or that they do not have a solid foundation, because a woman is a monster and a woman is a witch and a woman is the mindless fear of gynophobia and the castration complex.

Because woman, after all, is power

power you have never had,

power you never dared to have.

Elizabeth Prentis’s Skewer serves as an ode to this feminine power and the darkness of the allied monsters it succeeds in summoning, personifying and emulating. There is no modesty, no fear. The objects and sculptures featured in the exhibition are tetanic creatures meant to harm, to hurt. Freaks from the past and the future, female characters mutated into the warmongering and usurpations to which different societies and civilisations have subjected them. Thorns, claws, sharp blades, and a string of objects that challenge the viewer’s attention and physical integrity.

Traumas are externalised and made public. Scars stitched and exposed to the air. We roam through the open gaps, the space that these odd bodies allow between them. The flesh is pink; the skin, paper; the thorns, rigid; the creatures, both fragile and powerful, with nebulous masses, hefty legs and strong foundations. Nothing is light. Everything is profound. Like a wound gouged deep into the dermis, the epidermis, tearing arteries and veins with gel nails down to the bone. Skewer is the latency of the female stigmata never before represented in art, war and salvation traces, individual and collective, of an emancipatory mission between women over the Gordian knot tied by men. This is the freedom that Nature has given them – the alien thorns that they have created, the teeth, the pointed nails, fully aware of the cost, but also conscious of all that they can achieve. The leaflet the artist developed to support the exhibition is plainly entitled: “Dystopian Darwinism”.

According to her, this is both a research into the cross-pollination between biology and art and a ravishing surrender to a dystopian future in which female bodies are made up of add-ons, hardware and software. This is biology and nature ontologically and epistemologically overhauled to accept the prosthesis, the metallic, silicon and synthetic accessory.

Skewer is a self-portrait, an autopsychography by Prentis, reflecting individual and collective traumas in her pieces. It mirrors and forms an experience in/of the world, which is not her parents’ living room. It calls for defensive actions, preparation, self-knowledge and awareness of society in general. Without ever patronising or condescending, Skewer is a lesson, a warning, but also a rallying cry for female empowerment and a sexual individuation practice. Anti-rape devices, chastity underwear, chains, transhumanist props, patents to develop mechanisms capable of injecting narcotics into rapists’ penises – the tools are all there. And so are the sexual personae.

From a plastic standpoint, everything is grounded in a radical experimentalism that combines drawing, sculpture, ceramics and installation. The range of objects propped up on the wall are physical exercises in endurance and strength; the metal is cut, drawn and crossed out as if we were looking at a sheet of paper. The thorns protruding from the wall, the teeth jutting out of mouths, and the vaginae dentatae bear the opalescent glaze of ordinary ceramics and the rugged lustre of the minerals found in clay. The sculptures take on a theatre-like presence. Utterly different materials (fake wigs, supermarket leaflets, metal, expanded polystyrene, enamel) are given complete forms of existence, in a maximalist style which is both liberating and surprising.

It is therefore a cathartic exercise that explores the politics and micro-politics of the feminine, that conceals the psychosexual dramas and tragedies, the taboos, to reveal what is real behind the myths and ancient stories, fighting and debating for a transversal, intersectional feminist manifesto. Skewer deals with social psychology, rejects stereotypes, meanders through ancestral imagination, and individual neuroses that turn out to be collective, and subverts current power relations. Skewer is a myth of the future, where women no longer need to be docile or adopt, as Clarissa Pinkola Estés notes in Women Who Run With The Wolves. Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (1992), the stance of a “disguise creature”. They are the neglected heroines, finally celebrated.

Because there are no conceivable metaphors for a violent sexual experience, there is the pain of a spike thrust into the womb, and the pain of a ruptured phallus immediately after. To those who do not want to suffer the castration by a vagina dentata, a skull crushed by high heels, or the scratches of sharp nails… join as allies.

Because, at last, you will know:

the body holds memories.

Elizabeth Prentis’ Skewer is at Balcony – Contemporary Art Gallery until September 18. Piece by Luísa Santos.