Mónica Mayer’s ‘El Tendedero’ Project: Forty Years of Feminist Art Framing Gender-Based Violence in Mexico

Abstract

El Tendedero is a living work of art where women who encounter it can hang their testimonies of the different forms of violence they have suffered during their lives on Mexican pink papers. Throughout this chapter we will see how this performative installation by Mexican visual artist Mónica Mayer was conceived, as well as its transcendence in the feminist art movements of the twenty-first century. First, the context in which the work was born is presented: during the 1970s, an incipient second-wave feminist movement organized its first demands in the public space and most of these actions acquired a performative character. Monica Mayer begins her feminist and artistic militancy in this scenario of ephemeral installations, street theater and political proposals that stood out for their innovation compared to other mobilizations of the traditional left. In a second moment, we will see how the first two Tendederos were linked to Mexican conceptual art on the one hand and, on the other, to the proposals against rape and gender-based violence carried out by the American feminist artists who were formed, together with Mayer, at the Woman’s Bulding in Los Angeles. We will then look at the various “reactivations” of El Tendedero in different countries and their adaptations. Finally, we will analyze the aesthetic-political strategies developed by El Tendedero: the collection of a multiplicity of testimonies that link the spectator with the material reality of gender-based violence and the use of El Tendedero as a living archive that, in each new reactivation, collects the feelings of women regarding gender-based violence in a specific context. We will conclude by pointing out that the transcendence of El Tendedero lies in the fact that the diverse aesthetic strategies it employed condense a large amount of historical and artistic elements that were inseparable from its political history.

Art is to society what dreaming is to the body: an irrepressible space where experience (past) and desire (future) coexist, which is essential for profound changes to be produced in the present.

Mónica Mayer

This research has been possible thanks to the project ‘El amor y sus reversos: Pasión, deseo y dominio en las relaciones sentimentales a través del arte contemporáneo’. PGC2018-093404-B100, financed by FEDER/Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades—Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Gobierno de España.