pissing girls - video 5

How people feel about wetting is normally kept private, except on websites like this one. But in 2016, Brazilian performance artist Dora Smék led 26 women in wetting themselves publicly in a major gallery as a piece of performance art.

Smék recruited her performers using online ads and a Youtube video, based on a smaller action during which eight women wet themselves. At a later event, 15 women wet themselves publicly. Participants were not required to wet themselves, but almost all did. Otherwise, why would they have been there?

A video of the 2016 event, called “Transbordação” (Overflowing), shows the women walking together onto the space that was used as a stage, standing breathing together, and then wetting. After each woman wets, she walks ahead out of the row, until only two women are left. Smék had previously studied dance, and arranged the action as a form of dance.

On her website, Smék explains the action in terms of breaking conditioning, as “an inversion: to de-automate the trained processes of the body.” Smék, a feminist, considers that being "a woman" is the result of conditioning, a conditioning she wants to break. She adds that “this displacement inevitably accesses a considerable range of internal conflicts, which, from the intentional act of wetting one’s pants in public, expands to a whole complex network of conditions incorporated throughout life, such as the very dichotomous notions that underlie the concept of adequacy, or inadequacy.”

In an interview (in Portuguese) , Smék explained the genesis of her action. A group of women were practising breathing together, when one wet herself. Nobody knew what to do, but Smék herself was fascinated by the concentration on the face of the woman who was wetting.

Smék does not explain her own history with wetting, but reveals during the interview that during a performance in 2015 she herself had been unable to pee.

Unsurprisingly, Smék’s performance also attracted hostile attention. The Facebook video is shown on a hostile thread by a “De-left-ification” group that informs Brazilians that this is what their tax money is paying for (the gallery where it was performed is publicly funded). Reactions against Smék’s performance are part of the wave of conservative feeling that got right-wing President Bolsonaro elected.

Even so, Smék’s achievement in gathering together 26 women who, for one reason or another, wanted to wet in public is a considerable one. And, yes, it is all abut social constructions, conditioning, and the notions that underlie the concepts of adequacy and inadequacy. That is why many visitors to this website are here.

Following comments from some of Smék’s collaborators suggests that many were, like, her, feminist artists. One especially, Laura Moreira, found the action important, to judge from the photos she published on her own website.

What was this?

I want to drink from all of these girls.