winters while waiting

Nieves Mingueza

«winters while waiting» explores online gender abuse through photography art practices, employing a practice-based and trauma-informed approach. Using autoethnography as the starting point, the research navigates the complexities between past personal-subjective experiences and current public-objective data, investigating how these narratives can be reframed, reinterpreted, and reconstituted in a contemporary mixed-media art project. The project repurposes found photographs as transitional objects, assigning them new meanings, contexts, and audiences, while also addressing the ethical considerations of using these artefacts in artistic practice.

The creative outcome is an installation that brings together original photographs from the artist’s collection with various paper materials and donated resources. The first component consists of a series of black-and-white collages that conceptualise women’s testimonies. The second element is a paper-based sculptural structure made of matchboxes, each containing experimental photomontages alongside a list detailing the different types of online abuse. The third part of the installation features a series of colour collages that explore the trauma and psychological impact of cyber abuse on victims’ mental well-being.

Additionally, the study examines systemic inadequacies in addressing online abuse, particularly the lack of adequate responses from social media platforms and legal entities. By reshaping the discourse, this research aims to foster conversations about this complex issue and provide new insights into the representation of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) in general, and Gender Online Abuse in particular.

Opening - 19/09/2024 - Barcelona