Five audiovisual portraits against the social phobia of aging and for the visibilization of older women: their voices, their bodies, their strength and their beauty.
Cuerpos de la Vejez (Bodie of Agings) is the portrait of five older women who decide to tell their life story through their own bodies. Bodies that, because of the historic time they have lived, have been silenced and veiled during all their stages; but yet, before reaching their final stage, they claim their right to appear, to be looked at and admired.
A poetic act, vindicating as well as aesthetic, to restore beauty to old age and portray its diversity, going through its dermal geology up close: its scars, wounds, wrinkles, erosions and limitations, to discover its true sedimented treasures: the new creative possibilities of its present.
A campaign written and directed by Lucía Callén, starring the Lideresas de Villaverde for the project Al Final de la Vida, fruit of the collaboration between OMC Radio and Fundación Vivo Sano, with the support of Obra Social La Caixa.
Paloma: A changing body
Fe: A walking body
Manuela: A body of roots
Julia: A body shining
Carmen: A body in adventure
Technical-artistic data
Presentation of Cuerpos de la Vejez at RESAD (Real Academia Superior de Arte Dramático):
Jornadas de Teatro y Feminismo RESAD
Presentation of Cuerpos de la Vejez at Jornadas Celebrarte of Plataforma PMAC:
Jornadas Celebrarte, Plataforma PMAC
CONTEXT:
Old age occurs in a subtle and subjective way, it does not appear suddenly, it is a constant transformation that, nevertheless, manifests itself, as long as and insofar as we believe we recognize the signs of the defective by reason of the gaze that canonizes and determines the normative body: wrinkles, hair loss or transformation, loss of muscle tone, accumulation of abdominal fat, etc. Medical technologies and the aesthetic industry have declared war on death, disease and old age, fostering phobia and social rejection of a natural and inevitable process of human beings, capitalizing on the final process of life and turning older people into physical and psychological illnesses simply because they are old, and their bodies into an object of lifelong exploitation.
Because of their condition, older women are doubly disadvantaged and their bodies doubly stigmatized: Women are confined to being an objective body, a body that is circumscribed to its own representation and in which others find pleasure. Her experience of corporeality does not matter, nor is it she who is the subject of desire (Dulce Suaya, 2015).
In her book Old Age, Simone de Beauvoir reminds us that old age is a destiny, reminds us of its diversity, and that it should be understood as a new stage, equally creative and empowering. We want to continue to experience what it is to be a body and, through it, to open ourselves to the new possibilities that this stage offers us, recovering the right to grow old.