A concrete sculpture built into a hillside in Brazil is sparking outrage across the Internet. That's because the 108ft long creation painted in bright red depicts a vagina.
Artist Juliana Notari was the visionary of the work, which she calls "Diva". The sculpture was revealed to the public on Saturday.
The artist hired a group of diggers to help carve out the shape in the hillside, cover it with concrete and paint it. Apparently the sculpture, located in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, is located in a public park on the site of a former sugar mill and was funded by a government program.
A Facebook post showing the sculpture sparked controversy and outrage. "One of the stupidest things I've ever seen," someone writes. Another says, "Didn't think it was cool. It's worse the government allowed this to be done in a public park."
Juliana wrote the following to accompany the photos she shared on her Instagram account (translated from Portugese via Google Translate):
Amid so many rocks in the middle of this dystopian year, I finally end the year with the work Diva ready !! It was a long process, almost 11 months of persistence, coexistence and learning.
Diva after all is a great handmade sculpture. As Roberto, the engineer who was responsible for the work (and who put his hands to work!) Demonstrated, it was not possible to use an excavator, because she would not allow to accurately sculpt the reliefs she needed. So it was more than 40 hands to make Diva born, more than twenty men working in a Herculean effort under the high sun, amid much music and joke.
Diva is a Land art, a huge excavation in the shape of a vulva / wound measuring 33 meters high, 16 meters wide and 6 meters deep, covered with reinforced concrete and resin.
In “Diva”, I use art to dialogue with questions that refer to the problematization of gender from a feminine perspective combined with a worldview that questions the relationship between nature and culture in our Western phallocentric and anthropocentric society. These issues are now becoming increasingly urgent. After all, it will be through changing the perspective of our relationship between humans and between human and non-human, that will allow us to live longer on this planet and in a less unequal and catastrophic society.
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PS: Diva is the result of my artistic residency at Usina and an agreement between Usina de Arte and @mamam - Museum of Modern Art Aloisio Magalhães.
Pics below (possibly NSFW):
Source: DailyMail.co.uk