Mateas Pares: Could you tell us a little bit about the background of the artwork?
Ida Silfverdal: Every, or next to every, morning I begin my day by putting away my genitals with tape. It’s a continuous process of shaping and regulating my body. The tape machine emerged out of a curiosity to explore my relationship with this ongoing and habituated process. How I can’t shake the feeling of becoming a remodelling apparatus, a machine.
Images from the video piece "Tejpmaskin"
In the work, however, you are not taping your genitals but your body. Could you tell us about that decision?
My daily act of taping is of course directed towards my genitals. In its mundane repetition, however, taping, as an experience, reaches beyond merely the genitals. It becomes a bodily experience, an existential one. Every morning of strained adjustments, evenings of misaligned ease, and a lingering sticky tape residue all boil down to a persistent sense of machinery. It was this experience I wanted to explore, and not merely me tucking away my genitals.
Ida Silfverdal
In my experience, there are if not only women, at least far more women than men, who use their naked bodies in their artistry: Marina Abramovic, Tracey Emin, Carolee Scnheemann, Yoko Ono, Hannah Wilke. I can’t think of a male artist who uses his body as a tool in the same way. As a transgender woman, how has the usage of the male and female body in art, affected your artistry, and your decision of using your body in your artistry?
I think it’s a tricky process to try and distinguish between male and female bodies. But I agree with your perception of women being next to the only ones using their nude bodies in art. Working within such a context has for sure given me a framework to explore my own body. Though it’s also a context I experience to be saturated in waves of feminism not too kind towards transgender women. Considering this, I do find myself struggling to find a way of working with my female body in art, a body not compliant with such feminist movements. I believe my choice to not be fully naked in the video was due to this. It was almost a way to protect my integrity from being scrutinized. I didn’t want my cock and small breasts to be the focus of my work. By hiding them both with tape I sought to make my body somewhat impersonal, like a machine is. I believe this relationship to my female body is different from the relationship a cisgender artist has to hers, a body not drenched in portrayals of danger and uncertainty. Maybe if there was a wider context of men exploring their nude bodies, the collective imaginaries around cocks might become nuanced enough to also allow women to carry them in their art?
Interviewer and curator: Mateas Pares
