OBSESSED WITH BREASTS

In a world so obsessed with breasts; with their symbolism as an organ of supreme moral nourishment and forbidden temptation alike, as a political arena where the laws of propriety are written, and how and what kind of woman one must be; Mastectomy is castration. Nothing less.

Breasts are the agreed upon signifier of femininity and fertility, the organ whose presence validates our sexual identity and the symbol through which we are inscribed in space, and as such, breasts are a Master Signifier, no less than the penis. For  women facing breast cancer, castration is not a theoretical matter from the realms of fantasy and anxiety, but a completely literal surgical excision of their female phallus.

I was forty when three cancerous lumps were discovered in my breast. In a single stroke my beloved boobs, which until then had afforded me immense and natural careless pleasure, were transformed into breasts, a public organ, discussed by strangers, who perform various and painful procedures upon it.

Two days before I had to part with my breasts forever, I aimed the camera at their reflection in the mirror, and immortalized the relationship between them and the forces of gravity and sensation, the way they erect at a shiver, their aesthetic, erotic and symbolic essence. I documented what would soon become, a last representation of what existed and is no more: Ça a été.

The loss of the Master Signifier, around which my sexual identity and deepest self-perception were constructed, rocked my very being. Gazing at the severed body triggered error messages, and an inability to assemble or conceptualize the radical changes that within three months erased most of what marked me as a woman. The physical loss turned into a semantic collapse.

In my bedroom, my main arena as a person and as an artist at the time, the mirror transformed from a gateway of identity into an arena of dismantling and amputation; of failing every standard dictated by the normalizing gaze. 

Out of this disintegration, a relationship was born; in which the amputated cancer patient had no choice but to surrender completely to her role as the ruthless photographer’s object. 

An absolute trust, in which the photographer commits to repeatedly aim an invasive and judgemental eye at the object, to document the peaks of loss and pain, while ensuring the camera always remains in the hands of the object.

I underwent five failed attempts at breast reconstruction, a restorative effort to create anesthetic monuments, void of sensation, whose role was to render the body readable and culturally compliant once again. 

Simultaneously, I became a pioneering entrepreneur in the global FemTech arena and the two startups I founded, focused on the specific experience of breast loss, and created a constant friction with an industry who is dedicated to creating and perfecting purely symbolic solutions and marketing them as "the breasts you’ve always dreamed of."

To succeed in redefining myself as a whole new subject, I had to step outside the boundaries of any patriarchal gaze and create intimate reconstructions, faithful to the sensory and emotional dimensions that had been severed. Through the artistic act, I expropriated the breast from the regimes that govern it and reclaimed my sovereignty, interpretation and memory.

Obsessed with Breasts is not merely a documentation of a semantic collapse, but a body of work that by using makeup pigments and knives on cowhide, allowed me deconstruction and healing. This is my struggle into freedom from the expectation of a perfect representation toward the reality of a living, aching and creating body, which earned a validation to exist.