Breaking the Gaze Column
by Semíramis González
No pienso recoger los platos rotos (I’m Not Going To Pick Up The Broken Dishes). 2020.
Diptych. Pencil and watercolor on paper. 70 x 100 cm.
Significantly, the erasure of half the human population has occurred across so many domains of life, including those where their labor was essential for the capitalist system’s development. Women “are the majority, yet we are structured within social institutions as if we were a minority” (Lerner, 1990). Women’s productive and reproductive power has been present in the industrialization that led to globalized capitalism, also expanding how their capabilities have been appropriated. This evident reality remains a gap in many historical analyses since the Industrial Revolution, overlooking the fact that the primitive accumulation involving women propelled changes in governance and was a driving force in history despite resulting in disadvantages for them.
As Federici (2010) profoundly analyzes, the patriarchal system “has sought to discipline and appropriate the female body, revealing that women’s bodies have constituted primary targets—privileged sites—for the deployment of power techniques and power relations.” If we had the space for a more detailed analysis, we would explore why a social subject gradually transforms into an object to be exploited by the system, wherein women become second-class citizens. This issue extends beyond the gender dimension; factors such as social class and race also contribute to the greater exploitation of their bodies or the violence they endure. Nonetheless, we can assert that in capitalism, “the body is for women what the factory is for male wage workers: the primary ground for their exploitation and resistance” (Federici, 2010).
Building on a feminist analysis of the socio-historical reality of her immediate environment (the Nalón Mining Basin in northern Spain), artist Natalia Pastor (Pola de Laviana, 1970) presents a site-specific installation at the Barjola Museum (Gijón, Spain) designed for the Chapel. The various elements of this installation disrupt what Federici calls the “politics of the body,” [1] proposing a feminist stance that denies the body as merely a sphere of the private.
Self-portrait. 2019. Pencil and watercolor on paper. 100 x 70 cm.
This “Domestic Barricade – From Within to Without” incorporates artistic processes Pastor has employed for years, from textiles and embroidery to drawing and photography. The installation interweaves the public sphere and private space through elements like a large barricade made from household objects (mattresses, chairs, towels, furniture, utensils, cleaning products, or toys), a mountain of coal, various embroidered textile elements, a large photograph, and a sound piece. Each object alludes to different conceptual aspects that have articulated Pastor’s work for decades. On the one hand, this is a situated artistic proposal that cannot overlook the specific context in which the artist has developed her work and where she lives: the Nalón Mining Basin, known for its mining tradition and working-class roots. With this series of pieces that burst into the space, Pastor aims to reclaim recognition for the work women contributed during industrialization and mining. The Asturian mining region in northern Spain transitioned from being a hub of economic and social growth to witnessing a deep depression following the reconversion and closure of mines. The role of women in mining has been traditionally silenced or insufficiently recognized. In recent years, more voices have sought to recover the contributions of women coal miners, not only for performing underpaid and barely visible work but also because it was through their networks of collaboration and solidarity that an incipient industrial feminism emerged, serving as a foundation for resistance during the Franco dictatorship (Nogueira, 2023).
Furthermore, poorly compensated work was compounded by the invisible tasks of care, which have always fallen on women. While this care work is fundamental to sustaining the capitalist system, it remains socially unacknowledged. The women Pastor advocates for in her barricade exemplifies that society expects them to contribute financially to the household and accept domestic responsibilities as added unpaid labor (Federici, 2017)
The barricade also alludes to the solidarity networks of workers protesting for dignified working conditions. Here, this barricade does not burn or consist of barrels or tires. Instead, the sleeping mattress, toys, and household utensils visualize the protest from a traditionally private space that is, in reality, a social and public one. The family structure is deeply patriarchal (Millett, 2019) and has only recently, under the light of the latest feminist demands of the Fourth Wave, begun to acknowledge care work. Feminism has been advocating for this since the 1970s, but sociological analyses have often regarded familial issues as minor and of little interest, relegating what occurs in the family sphere—the very site of women’s exploitation. Engels (2017) even noted that “the man is the bourgeois in the family; the woman represents the proletarian.” However, this insight has not been consistently integrated into broader inequality studies; class is addressed, but gender is not.
Exhibition view “Domestic Ring,” by Natalia Pastor
Pastor invites us to engage critically with these sources that have been contestatory and reivindicative yet often overlook domestic issues. From earlier works like “Domestic Ring,” the artist sought to challenge the elements that shaped her identity: the combative and resilient spirit of a region like the Nalón Basin, juxtaposed with the autobiographical and the private. The feminist declaration that “the personal is political” blurs its boundaries in the carefully staged presentation of Pastor’s works, where both intertwine inextricably. Using a family mining jumpsuit in its characteristic blue hue, the artist embroiders messages and portrays herself wearing it, reinterpreting the iconic Rosie the Riveter in the 21st century within the Asturian industrial context.
For Pastor, feminist references to predecessors are crucial, and adhering to the maxim that doing genealogy is also doing feminism, her work makes allusions to pioneering feminist art pieces like “Womanhouse” by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro in California in 1972, as well as to Martha Rosler and Birgit Jürgenssen. In all these works, the domestic space became a protagonist for visualizing a site of violence but also of resistance, contradiction, and empowerment. The installation at the Barjola Museum is suffused with these references, not only in the barricade itself but also in the embroidered textile elements featuring slogans from the March 8th demonstrations, along with others related to labor, the symbolic violence of domestic spaces, and banners from protests and mining strikes. Some elements are so specific that they feel almost like relics from another time, such as the towels from HUNOSA or the mining jumpsuit.
However, one piece stands out amid this organized chaos of feminist protest and advocacy occupying the chapel space at the Barjola Museum. It is a photograph on the central wall showing the artist atop a coal mountain, waving a flag made with an embroidered towel, a mop, and a broom. She wears the mining jumpsuit, adorned with embroidered phrases, and is positioned in a composition that alludes to Eugène Delacroix’s iconic work “Liberty Leading the People” (1830). While the Romantic painting was an appeal for freedom and a protest against the authoritarianism of Charles X, exalting citizen response in the streets, Pastor’s work reinterprets the scene from a feminist and critical perspective. She is not the only one who has done this. The only female figure in Delacroix’s painting is Marianne, the allegory of liberty, surrounded by men of various social classes and ages. She serves as the guide but appears partially naked and bears the French flag. In 2009, artist Cristina Lucas revived this scene in a video piece titled “La Liberté raisonnée” (Lucas, 2009), activating Marianne’s actions and destiny; more than the frozen moment captured by Delacroix, it presents another. What would the reality of a semi-naked woman have been during civic protests in the 19th century?
House-work 2020. Pencil and watercolor on paper. 42 x 229.7 cm
Moreover, what would her fate be today, on any street, at any demonstration? Natalia Pastor attempts to respond to these questions by transforming Marianne into an empowered woman, guiding herself as she climbs the coal mountain, clearly referencing the mining context. She wields the very objects that have accompanied women and remained hidden by the sexist system: domestic utensils become here both a proclamation and a subversion; the mop has lost its original meaning to serve as a flag bearing the words “Dame tira” (“Sister, give me a push”—the rallying cry from the March 8th, 2023 demonstration held in another city within the mining basin, Mieres, during a regional call) (Domínguez, 2023). The symbols are subverted in this self-portrait of the artist, profoundly provocative due to the messages embedded in every element of the composition, from the landscape to the objects accompanying it.
This is not the first time Pastor has portrayed herself wearing her family’s mining jumpsuit or appearing with domestic objects. She has done so in various drawings, such as in 2019, where she stepped on dinnerware, rebelling against domestic tasks, or in the diptych “I Won’t Pick Up the Broken Plates” (2020). Although her work employs diverse mediums without limitations, freely transitioning between drawing, photography, video, or installation, this current portrait on display at the Barjola Museum represents a further step in her feminist and autobiographical reflection. Here, the medium is crucial; the photograph can only reveal and highlight a stance that rises to the summit of the coal mountain. As Millett (2019) points out, women’s labor serves as a reserve that is drawn upon in times of scarcity and relegated to the domestic sphere in times of abundance. Natalia Pastor transforms the unease and frustration of women engaged in care work—this problem that lacked a name—into an image of empowerment and possibility (Friedan, 2009). Like Rosler in her “Semiotics of the Kitchen,” the fork, coffee grinder, or broom can serve as tools for subversion.
Natalia Pastor in her studio in Gijón, Spain. Photo by Juan Carlos Román
If, in the linear patriarchal history, we have learned women were seen as a minority due to the inferiority of their position (Millett, 2019), Natalia Pastor makes a case here for the fundamental contribution of women to the workforce and the industrial impetus in the Asturian Mining Basin. Moreover, the networks they built in resistance against dictatorship and worker solidarity were also essential beyond their role as surplus labor. Naming them, bringing them to light, and presenting them as a feminist exercise. In the same vein, Pastor intertwines the history of a territory and its genealogy with her own story, drawing connections between the mining territory and her autobiography. The confluence of being a working woman, an artist, and a mother and the contradictions this entails in her creative process also finds expression here. Rigorously and deeply anchored in her feminist artistic references, but with a situated perspective from where she creates and in the context where she lives, Pastor presents a barricade that could occupy the streets and halt traffic in protest of the undervalued labor performed by women. The appliances, the mattress, and the utensils serve as barriers and a testament to the idea that, as Federici indicated, the domestic sphere is not merely a private domain. In this installation, the focus is not on what happens in the streets that could be brought into homes; instead, it is about how we channel anger and demand change by taking furniture to the streets. In that “from within to without” lies a highly transformative possibility: that changes do not remain at the threshold but cross the doorway and release everything that resides within.
Domestic Barricade, Inside Out Natalia Pastor exhibition, will be in the Barjola Museum (Calle Trinidad, 17, 33201, Gijón, Asturias, Spain) from December 19, 2024, to February 23, 2025.
[1] Federici, S. (2010). Calibán y la bruja: Mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación primitiva ( Trans. V. Hendel). Editorial Traficantes de Sueños.
References
Domínguez, A. (2023). The song of 8M in Asturias: This is how “Sister, give me a push” sounds [Newspaper]. La Nueva España. https://www.lne.es/asturias/8-m-dia-de-la-mujer-en-asturias/2023/03/08/cancion-8m-asturias-suena-companera-84331147.html
Engels, F. (2017). The origin of the family, private property, and the state. Marx-Engels Archive, Spanish Section of the Marxists Internet Archive. Editorial Progreso.
Federici, S. (2010). Caliban and the witch: Women, body, and primitive accumulation (Trans. V. Hendel). Editorial Traficantes de Sueños.
Federici, S. (2017). Undeclared war: Violence against women. Artforum. https://www.artforum.com/features/undeclared-war-violence-against-women-234332/
Friedan, B. (2009). The feminine mystique. Cátedra Ediciones.
Lerner, G., Tusell, M. (1990). The creation of patriarchy. Editorial Crítica.
Lucas, C. (2009). La liberté raisonnée [Video]. https://ca2m-coleccion.org/catalogo/obra/la-liberte-raisonnee/
Millett, K., Moreno Sardá, A. (2019). Sexual politics (5th ed.). Ediciones Cátedra.
Nogueira, R. (2023, March 8). The mining past of women in Asturias: “They were always there.” El Español. https://www.elespanol.com/enclave-ods/historias/20230308/pasado-minero-mujeres-asturias-siempre-ahi/746675618_0.html
