Why does Moník have a gun?

Years ago I realized my impotence; despite having many privileges, she was silenced. I had to approve the speech they gave me, lend myself to reinforce it and be rewarded for it.

He told me about a coven, about a conspiracy around him, about a very strange malaise. Moník Molinet’s concerns had no denomination. I didn’t understand something about behavior in general towards women. The first experiences of this Cuban visual artist in the world of fashion made her start a long journey towards feminism. Photography is their language and their discourse, equality.

«Fortunately I was presented with the situation of meeting formidable women who fed me the need to understand my situation as a woman. In this way I came to Simone de Beauvoir, Rebecca Solnit, the artist and activist Yolanda Domínguez. They are ultimately the coven responsible for my entry into feminism.”

Moník’s pistol is his brand and his most personal professional project. “I needed a weapon that would allow me to take over the speech.” The message would have to be modified, questioned and redone, he explains. «Years ago I realized my impotence; despite having many privileges, she was silenced.

I had to approve the speech they gave me, lend myself to reinforce it and be rewarded for it. This is why Moník has a pistol, a renamed weapon that does not destroy, but rather immortalizes.

The visual arts and especially photography are added to the artistic training of Mónica Molinet, who began classical music studies at the age of seven, in Pinar del Río. Later he continued with the performing arts at the National School of Arts in Havana, and then with photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Mexico City, “I cannot imagine my life without the fine arts.”

Today the visual arts represent the stage in which Moník confronts ideas and tells stories, “I address the theme of beauty, the search for the meaning of being a woman within the social construction, the alteration of the emotional landscape that a person can achieve”.

Beauty, its relativity and power is a theme present in all his work. “It has always intrigued me. Beauty can cause instant magnetism, even without understanding what is seen, our attraction to it is intrinsic in the human being.

For Moník, the representation of beauty lacks ethical meaning most of the time. This is one of the most controversial issues within the feminist debate. What is beauty? Who is beautiful or beautiful? How to evaluate it? What do these stereotypes represent in society?

The constant flow of ideas is what he understands as a work formula. Ideas that you frequently reject and question. «I believe that the basis of my work is the conscious improvement of discourse and aesthetics before facing the set, and as always, a bit of luck that can come from the hand of improvisation».

Through fashion photography, the so-called beauty, Moník developed skills and found “destination for [his] perfectionist needs”. This learning also allowed her to identify what she calls a visual communication problem, and that is that many beauties remain to be shown. “The beauty of emotion, the beauty of the indefinite, of character, the beauty in diversity.”

From this moment on, the portrait in Moník Molinet’s work will not be the same. «A portrait can be something intensely psychological, I can find beauty in the contradiction, in the emotion, in the “defect”, in the imprecise».

Fashion and advertising are clinging to limitations, to stereotypes about beauty. The construction of the image deforms reality, «they control the way in which we perceive the beautiful, influencing the readings we make and the value we give to people.

What escapes from that norm is associated with negative characteristics. Society is vulnerable to the pressures of the fashion and beauty industry that “increasingly move away from recognizing the beautiful in the natural to be dazzled by the constructed, fictitious, hegemonic beauty.”

BODY POSITIVE. A PROJECT FOR CHANGE

“It is imperative for me to associate the aesthetic with the ethical and start developing projects that are part of the solution.” That is Body Positive, a photographic series from her responsibility as a woman and creator.

Common bodies are the protagonists of these photographs, «beauty is explored in what is not usually shown, the beauty that is implicit in them. Human beauty, without poses, causing sorority to take over the space, leaving them full, safe, emotional».

Body Positive is a rebellion, a call to attention to a community in which the masculine construction of the image of women predominates, “and it is not that there is something wrong with this, it is that other views are lacking”.

The project shows women who do not fit the stereotypes. Friends of the photographer who also shared their experiences through videos posted on social networks.

«The history of painting and visual history has been showing us women as an object of desire for centuries, not as a desiring subject, giving them only a sexual dimension».

The photographic series shows them as they are. No excessive retouching, no rigid poses, no artifice. The few added elements complete the symbology of the images.

Tape measure, ladder, apples, magazine clippings complete the illuminated scene with an outline used in advertising photography. “We focus on the dynamics that exist between sorora women. I limited myself to documenting what was happening.”

The representation of sexuality in the visual arts is incomplete. “It is problematic, for example, for a young woman to consolidate her character from the referents of female characters constructed from a male perspective.”

The reduction of molds worries you. “This makes it difficult to empathize, confusing. Examples of these are widely in cinema, literature, television. The references are important in this case, so that a girl can imagine what she can become.

Social networks are an up-to-date example of the construction of Moník Molinet’s visual discourse, which provokes the questioning of the system with its messages. She hasn’t created a support network, she’s not an activist either, but photography has allowed her to make connections with many interesting women.

«I have known their stories, their thoughts, and I am incorporating their views, their voices, in my work. Let’s say that it is a spontaneous network, without structure but, without a doubt, growing».

Life in Mexico has prompted much of her concern about gender inequality. There the situation is urgent. “In almost the entire country, abortion is criminalized, raped girls are forced to become mothers, and violence against women is terrifying, ten women are murdered every day.” She lives the Mexican reality in the first person and criticizes the behavior of society that sexualizes women from childhood and the church that reifies her.

The wage gap, female representation in positions of power and the reinforcement of stereotyped roles complete the picture, which is not alien to the rest of the world. “The contrast with Cuba was immense and this prompted me to get closer to understanding the problem and to ask myself how, from my work, I could remedy, denounce this.”

Why does Moník have a gun?

“I have a gun because I am dangerous to myself, because I chose to be responsible for my own speech and to get out of my comfort zone. Through my shots I develop my voice, my ideas, I don’t feel powerless. I have a gun because I decided to put myself in that risky, fascinating and full of possibility position that is behind a camera. My pistol does not kill, it immortalizes, and it has many shots left.