Yolanda Leal

Yo Studio presents the exhibition ¿Quién teme a la mujer gorila?, a project by artist Yolanda Leal curated by Marcel del Castillo.

In a time standardized by consumer norms and capitalist morality, the rules of dressing, speaking, thinking and feeling are subjects that women must learn, from a very early age, without questioning. Family, religious, school and media education point to a model of woman subjected to the will and desires of men. These regulated structures make up what is known as gender, the set of norms, roles and expectations that are assigned to each sex.

However, as we know, gender is not something natural, rigid and immutable, but a social, historical and cultural construction, and as such, it can be questioned, transformed and subverted. This is how the philosopher Judith Butler puts it, proposing the concept of gender performativity. According to Butler, gender is not an essence or an identity, but a performance, a repetition of gestures, words and actions that are based on a previous script, but which can also be modified, parodied or inverted. Gender, therefore, is not something people have, but something people do.

In her project Gorilla Nature, Yolanda Leal explores an alternative route to the possibilities of gender, through confrontation, irony and subversive and playful gesture. She appropriates roles of masculinity by activating situations that break the norm in spatial and interpersonal relationships.

Disguised as a Gorilla, Leal deliberately constructs, in a situationist manner, an uncomfortable and agitated quotidian space, which breaks the standard scenario, in order to open the possibility of reconsidering the gender stereotypes associated with women, such as delicacy, beauty, submission or motherhood, in front of an image and gesture of strength, aggressiveness, rebelliousness and sexuality represented in the Gorilla...the Gorilla woman.

— Marcel del Castillo