“Destroy She Said..” Gendered bodies in public spaces

Analysing everyday’s practices, De Certeau suggests that the rhetoric of walking functions just as an ‘art of speaking’. In this line we can argue that the way women and men stay and move in social space is a cultural gendered language and that their body is a significant product (and producer) of spatial practices and their related power inequalities. Quoting the title of Marguerite Duras short-story ‘Detruire dit-elle..”, the paper will present and discuss the deconstructive art works of some contemporary women artists as provocative actions to denounce and ‘destroy’ a visual spatial culture reflecting and reproducing the social invisibility of women body. This is the case of Austrian artist Valie Export which literally performed in Wien new measures of the urban space with her body, or the case of American artist Barbara Kruger which denounced with her big urban posters the social ‘order not to move’ addressed to women. Inspired by foucauldian analysis on disciplined society, the bodily machines of Canadian artist Jana Sterbak suggest how the everyday power reproduces symbolical and physical borders in public space, while female bodies of American sculptor Kiki Smith, tracing the space with their internal bodily matter, are provocative marking figures. Finally Italian artist Monica Bonvicini with her videos and installations represents and criticizes the strong claustrophobic connection between architecture, gender and social power.