Natali Bravo-Barbee | Thinking About Photography

Natali Bravo-Barbee

Flores de Femicidio

In January 2019, an Argentine news article detailed a woman's murder at the hands of her male partner. The article noted an increase in violence against women in Argentina and it shared the victim's photograph. The image of this woman haunted me: the Flores de Femicidio project was born.

Flores de Femicidio / Femicide Florals is a memorial for women murdered by men (femicide) in her native land of Argentina. There were 327 femicides in 2019, in Argentina alone. I began by researching each woman’s story and creating an archive for each victim that included media stories and traces found on social media.

My work for the previous 5 years had been focused on using the alternative-photographic process called cyanotype. The same process created the flowers. The petals were hand-drawn on sheets of 22x30 inch watercolor paper, cut out, sorted into bags, each petal was hand-coated with cyanotype emulsion, exposed using my UV exposure unit, developed in my kitchen sink, shaped, dried, and assembled. The shadows captured on each petal were from various plants and laces. Some flowers came from my own garden located here in Queens, others I bought from markets. Floral lace has been a symbol of femininity that I use regularly in my cyanotypes and it felt natural to include in this project. Each cyanotype flower took a minimum of 10 hours to make.

Each flower consists of between 8-35 petals. All flowers are unique. Though some might appear similar there are differences. Each time the dried flowers were pressed against the paper to expose the cyanotypes, they crumbled and were no longer useable. Each flower is as unique as the woman it represents. From each flower hangs a blue and white striped string similar to the old air mail envelopes used in Argentina. This string symbolizes my ties to these women in Argentina though I am in New York. On the other end of the string is a tag. The tag represents a body tag that identifies each victim.

The flowers serve as a physical manifestation of each lost woman and drive home the enormous scale of the loss and how violence against women is prevalent and needs to be addressed worldwide.

When someone says 327 women were murder by men, that is just an arbitrary number that one may or may not be able to imagine. I have built these cyanotype flowers as a representation of each woman. When one stands in a room with all these flowers, the overwhelming number of them has an impact when a life, a person, a woman is associated with each. In the U.S. the media haven’t adopted the usage of the term ‘femicide’ to describe gender based crimes against women every time it applies. If they did, it would become apparent how problematic these societal issues are in individual communities and how dire the need to address them is.

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