YPJ- Jineology

 

YPJ-Jineology, iron bar, led matrix, electronic circuit, 2000 x 25 x 4 mm, 2018-2019

 YPJ-Jineology  is  a  light installation  inspired by the women revolution in Rojava, northern Syria:  this revolution tries to establish a direct democracy based on gender equality, environmentalism and pluralism. In this context “a science of women and free life” called Jineology emerged: a way of radical thinking from the women’s and not Western perspective. The word originated from the kurdish words jin -meaning women, and jian – meaning life, plus logos, the greek word for knowledge.

Jineology views women as the first colonized subject, the archetipical form of enslavement that paved the way for all the other forms of enslavement and exploitation: moreover, as the history of civilization can be viewed essentially as the history of enslavement of women, women’s freedom could be only achieved by rejecting the foundations of the ruling system.

For Jineology science and knowledge, together with political economic and social structures, are biased by the power structure of domination and power above women underlying them.
YPJ (women’s protection units, “kurdish: yekîneyên parastina jin), an all-female military organization rooted in Jineology, had and still has a crucial role in establishing of an ecological and plural democracy inside the syrian civil war, fighting at the same time against ISIS, Turkey and Western claims.

Quite often the YPJ fighters wear a traditional floral scarf: seeing them as closely related to Jineology project, my work takes these floral patterns as the point of departure. Indeed the typical floral patterns of the scarves worn by YPJ fighters are transformed into an animation for a led matrix through a specifically developed software. The software takes the image of the floral decoration of the scarf and makes it scroll up, as if the drawing crossed the led matrix. This matrix then is placed on a iron bar, remembering a flag, or a lighthouse: indeed when you see the bar from distance you only see a point light, but when you come closer you can discover the colors of the animation.

 YPJ – Jineology in the meteorite room

For the exhibition ART PÚBLIC – UNIVERSITAT PÚBLICA curated by Alba Braza at the University of Valencia I placed three iron bars (with three different animations based on three different scarves) inside the meteorite room of the “Museo de historia natural”.

At the level of the imaginary, meteorites and comets are associated with great change and transformation of the earth and of the human civilization.
By placing the three bars composing the installation in the same space of this symbol of change I would like to emphasize the capacity and transformative power of the ideas and practice of Kurdish women and all those other women struggling to create a new civilization based on equality, freedom, feminism and ecology. This concept is also reflected in the formal structure of the work, in which this energy of change, condensed in colored light, that resembles – as some students of the university pointed out- the colors of chemical reactions at the beginning of time.

 

 

Photo Art Public – Universitat Publica: Miguel Lorenzo