Skrik

malformalady:

Netsuke are miniature sculptures invented in 17th-century Japan to serve a practical function. Traditional Japanese garments had no pockets; however, men who wore them needed a place to store their personal belongings, such as pipes, tobacco, money, seals, or medicines.Their solution was to place such objects in containers (called sagemono) hung by cords from the robes’ sashes (obi). The containers may have been pouches or small woven baskets. Whatever the form of the container, the fastener that secured the cord at the top of the sash was a carved, button-like toggle called a netsuke.

Skrik

blackpaint20:

Die Teufelsbrücke (The Devil’s bridge)

Three figures sitting on a bull crossing a ravine on the back of a defil who, stretching his body across the gap, is forming a bridge; vulture in the foreground to right; state after the removal of the lettering. 1902 Etching (printed from a steel plate)

Print made by Albert Welti 

Printed by Heinrich Wetterroth 

Swiss

1902

Source: blackpaint20
Skrik

belaquadros:

Unveiling Frida Kahlo’s Closet

When the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo died in 1954, her husband muralist Diego Rivera locked her clothes and jewelry- all personal possessions- into a bathroom. Diego instructed that the room to be unlocked fifteen years after his own death. Forgotten, they stayed there for fifty years.

No one knew what was behind that locked door. Staring back from a life more notorious than most, were 300 items of Frida’s. Her jewelry, clothing, hair accessories, a  prosthetic leg, leather corsets, painted plaster casts and body molds. 

All the physical and emotional pain, joy and vitality is told through stories carried in Frida’s clothing and accessories. This treasure trove is organized into an exhibition titled Appearances Can Be Deceiving: The Dresses of Frida Kahlo,featuring eleven of Kahlo’s ensembles rotating every three months, showing forty outfits over the course of a year.

Conservators and curators said while excavating the hidden room, it was as if Frida was alongside them in the room. Her colorful clothing emitted a sense of happiness, while her hospital items, the casts and even medicine, were powerful to witness and held onto her sadness. 

Vogue Mexico is producing a room for the exhibition that will feature commissioned work from contemporary designers who have been influenced by Kahlo. A rep for the magazine declined to reveal the specific designers working on the project, but said that “they are international designers and one Mexican designer — all of them are very recognized in the fashion industry.”

The fashion curator Circe Henestrosa dug through the time capsule and organized the exhibition. Henestrosa says,“Garments are very powerful tools for social and cultural interpretation. These objects and garments tell you so much about the wearer and yes, the items do have a smell….how to describe the smell….it’s her. It’s a unique, beautiful smell, of her skin." 

Focusing on the issues of “disability” and “ethnicity,” the exhibition will be displayed in Frida Kahlo’s former home in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City, the Frida Kahlo Museum (Casa Azul) through November 2013. 

Source: belaquadros
Skrik

genderspace:

How to Make Love to a Trans Person by Gabe Moses
[queer slam poet]

Forget the images you’ve learned to attach
To words like cock and clit,
Chest and breasts.
Break those words open
Like a paramedic cracking ribs
To pump blood through a failing heart.
Push your hands inside.
Get them messy.
Scratch new definitions on the bones.

Get rid of the old words altogether.
Make up new words.
Call it a click or a ditto.
Call it the sound he makes
When you brush your hand against it through his jeans,
When you can hear his heart knocking on the back of his teeth
And every cell in his body is breathing.
Make the arch of her back a language
Name the hollows of each of her vertebrae
When they catch pools of sweat
Like rainwater in a row of paper cups
Align your teeth with this alphabet of her spine
So every word is weighted with the salt of her.

When you peel layers of clothing from his skin
Do not act as though you are changing dressings on a trauma patient
Even though it’s highly likely that you are.
Do not ask if she’s “had the surgery.”
Do not tell him that the needlepoint bruises on his thighs look like they hurt
If you are being offered a body
That has already been laid upon an altar of surgical steel
A sacrifice to whatever gods govern bodies
That come with some assembly required
Whatever you do,
Do not say that the carefully sculpted landscape
Bordered by rocky ridges of scar tissue
Looks almost natural.

If she offers you breastbone
Aching to carve soft fruit from its branches
Though there may be more tissue in the lining of her bra
Than the flesh that rises to meet it
Let her ripen in your hands.
Imagine if she’d lost those swells to cancer,
Diabetes,
A car accident instead of an accident of genetics
Would you think of her as less a woman then?
Then think of her as no less one now.

If he offers you a thumb-sized sprout of muscle
Reaching toward you when you kiss him
Like it wants to go deep enough inside you
To scratch his name on the bottom of your heart
Hold it as if it can-
In your hand, in your mouth
Inside the nest of your pelvic bones.
Though his skin may hardly do more than brush yours,
You will feel him deeper than you think.

Realize that bodies are only a fraction of who we are
They’re just oddly-shaped vessels for hearts
And honestly, they can barely contain us
We strain at their seams with every breath we take
We are all pulse and sweat,
Tissue and nerve ending
We are programmed to grope and fumble until we get it right.
Bodies have been learning each other forever.
It’s what bodies do.
They are grab bags of parts
And half the fun is figuring out
All the different ways we can fit them together;
All the different uses for hipbones and hands,
Tongues and teeth;
All the ways to car-crash our bodies beautiful.
But we could never forget how to use our hearts
Even if we tried.
That’s the important part.
Don’t worry about the bodies.
They’ve got this.