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Chicago Women Celebrate Their Day With Festivals Across the Globe
Produced by Lisa Matuska on Friday, March 07, 2008
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The exhibit "Celebrating Women" will run through September at the Field Museum |
March 8th was International Women's Day. A new exhibit at the Field Museum this month brings together photographs from women's festivals around the world and their connections to Chicago.
While International Women's Day is a global celebration, there seems to be no common way of celebrating women. That's what photographer Paola Gianturco discovered when she traveled to 15 countries on 5 continents documenting women's festivals.
GIANTURCO: In this exhibit and this book represents women on the one hand as kind and on the other hand as warriors, fierce, and literally everything in between.
The exhibit is called Celebrating Women and one of the festivals featured is the Kali Puja in Bengal, India.
ambi: chanting
At the Indo-American Heritage Museum in Roger's Park, Basanti Banerji is chanting mantras, praying to the goddess Kali. The story goes that Kali evolved to destory the evil forces of the universe.
BANERJI: She has a dark color, normally you would think of a goddess with a beautiful gleaming complexion, fair, but this particular goddess was enraged with all the wrong things, all the evildoing that was going on.
Banerji says Kali's image represents energy, strength and a struggle against eternal evil as well as our internal vices.
BANERJI: So Kali basically is demolishing those vices and then at the end of that she turns again into this loving compassionate mother that is beautiful and is very personal to you.
Also displayed at the Field Museum are photographs from the Brazilian Festival of Our Lady of the Good Death. During slavery in Brazil, women did not have the same opportunities as men to organize.
ambi: Afro-Brazilian music
The Brazilian Cultural Center's Maria Drell is playing music from an area in northeastern Brazil where the Sisterhood of Good Death holds its yearly festival.
DRELL: They were former slaves they were also involved with the Afro-Brazilian religion which, it was not as well accepted as the catholic religion so the women first of all had to be accepted by the church.
The festival celebrates the women who, more than a century ago, decided they would rather die than live without freedom. Alaka Wali is a curator at the museum. She says the festivals in India and Brazil, among others, show how in many cultures women not only take on individual struggles, but those of society as well.
WALI: We cannot separate what are women's rights issues from what are human rights issues, or what is good for the well -being of the whole social group.
In five years of documenting these festivals photographer Gianturco says she began to question her own ideas of gender roles. The biggest challenge came when looking at American women.
GIANTURCO: So I did a lot of exploratory shooting festivals of Navajo weavers but all the time I was doing that I kept hearing Bert Parks singing, there she goes your ideal…
ambi: Bert Parks
GIANTURCO: And I thought if I'm going to be intellectually honest about this I have to go to Miss America.
She did in 2002 and says the diversity and scholarship of the pageant surprised her. But she says Miss America is still not the ideal answer she was looking for. Perhaps if International Women's Day were a pageant, Gianturco's winner would be a festival celebrating the creativity of women helping each other all over the world.
For Chicago Public Radio, I'm Lisa Matuska.
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