Cabinet Portret | Colectiva Vagenta

Cabinet Portret
Colectiva Vagenta
14 & 15.2.2015   13.00 -19.00

VAGENTA took part in the LGBT History Month 2015 with Cabinet Portret, an experiment that attempted to blur the conventional delimitation of gender.
We explored the concept of androgyny in an open photo shooting, addressed to anyone interested in playing with its own image and the attempt to pose somewhere at the limit between masculine and feminine.

make-up: Ioana Covali & Mihaela Cherciu (with the support of Avon)
costume: Diana Bobină
foto: Ioana Enescu
documentation: Black Horse Mansion

How can we talk about the androgynous in regard to the contemporary society?
At Plato, the androgynous is the fulfilled mythological gender, who’s power comes from unity not duality. This third sex, ironically nonsexual, seemed to have such great power that the gods decided to split forever.
Each of us has a unique blend of feminine and masculine involved in the way we represent our personal image. Through this functionality, the present society still pressures a strict delimitation of the two.
The portrait, as a technique, explores the most powerful anatomic exponent of our personality, the representation of the face, originating from the geometric ideal of beauty in humanity, with emphasis on symmetry.
The masculine form of representation (mask) is actually a mathematical variation of the feminine image. The human physiognomy has a feminine startpoint, even in male characters.
Genetically speaking, the Y chromosome responsible for the male physiology, is visible from the fifth month of a fetus’s development. Biologically, the change is produced through time, by the infusion of testosterone and it all starts with puberty transforming the physical configuration.
How and in what form this process materializes, becomes a trace of individual particularity.

Cabinet Portret is a photographic exercise in search of the differences that delimitate the unity of representation in the collective portrait. Starting with the hypothesis that the nowadays androgynous can transcend the gender problem through the collective force, unity in diversity.

ⓋⒶⒼⒺⓃⓉⒶ
feminine perspectives towards transcending gender

Read an article about the project in Sub25 (in Romanian).