Amazon Armor

Although the projects are different in genre and sometimes direction, they are all focused around
my interests in gender, technology, science, performance art, film, video and media culture.
Is there anything that you want to add about your practice or your upcoming performance that I did not ask you about?
Yes, I think one important piece of mine, which will add more light to the entire conversation about
my practice is The Last Valve (2004). In this piece I stitch up my vagina with surgical thread to express the
possibility of shutting up the hostility between genders. The piece refers to one of the points of the ULTRAFU-
TURO manifesto (the first manifesto of my collective ULTRAFUTURO), which anticipates the appearance
of artificially constructed biological bodies that will lack sexual characteristics. The existence of these bodies
proposes the idea that life can exist without the “essential” marks of the sexes, that are often referred to as
fundamental for constructing our gender discrepancies. So maybe by looking at these future bodies we can
decide that gender hostility creates more problems than happiness and try to overcome it? This utopic scenario
for “overcoming gender” (this is how we defined it) has been metaphorically expressed in this piece.
The last piece I would like to mention is Vitruvian Body (2009) – which takes a similar direction,
although not that utopian. I comment on the drawing Vitruvain Man by Leonardo as a limiting ideal of
beauty and universality. The drawing represented universal human proportions (which are of a white man)
to be applied in arts and architecture. But the same image is also used widely in medical iconography and
branding to represent “humanity” and applies also to social relations. In this piece my partner Oleg is
stitching me up to a construction made out of a circle and a square, the shapes in which the Vitruvian Man
is inscribed. By that I represent the limits of this “universality” which does not include varieties of bodies
and puts one ideal above all others. Here again I bring together notions from technology and science and
try to look at how they are affecting social life.
A condensed version of this interview was published
on the Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival blog:
www.rapidpulse.org/interview-with-boryana-rossa.
Pervert Veggies 1, 2013. Boryana Rossa.
Photographer: Laura Heyman
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