Mireia Sallarès: Little Deaths
As part of her research into her own relationship with the nature of orgasm, Mireia Sallarès travelled through Mexico between 2006 and 2009 with a camera and a pink neon sign that read Las Muertes Chiquitas (Little Deaths) – an expression that in Mexico refers to the orgasm. En route, she interviewed numerous women of very different ages and social backgrounds about their experience of sexual pleasure. An object designed to be placed as an advertisement in a public place, here the neon symbolises the power and fragility of female sexuality, by moving around the conversations that cover everything that is usually left unspoken, but also, and above all, about what it is to be a woman The result is almost five hours of documentary that makes it clear how the control of women’s pleasure is fundamental to the maintenance of patriarchy and how an experience that is supposedly as intimate and as private as sexual pleasure works as a high-precision political weapon. In this way, sexuality is situated on the spectrum of public pleasure, between ideological, religious and cultural transactions on the one side, and control mechanisms on the other.
