60 sets of hanging boobies, 60 individualistic dreams
It was a cozy Saturday night, I dropped by my friends’ place for a home cook dinner. We were having a sweet collection of pumpkin, potato, long bean, shimeji mushroom, and egg tofu soaked in the aromatic Japanese curry. While having those creamy and tasty ingredients in our mouths, my friend Raven came up with something that spiced up the conversation.
“Are you interested in exhibitions?”
“Yes.”
“My roommate and I did a project. We used an analog camera to shoot 60 boobies, and we are going to curate them next Friday in our place. Wanna join?”
The image of over 60 titties flashed in my mind all of a sudden. Unconsciously they stirred up the food both in my plate and palate. I swallowed the remaining umami with a rather plain answer.
“Sure”.
A “boobies” was born
The boobies started their journey in this eighty square meters apartment where the bustling Witte de With Straat accompanied the generation of wild imagination. Laura, Raven’s roommate by contract, found a beautiful self-portrait picture of her boobies. While she was carefully examining the beatitude of her breast, a question suddenly jumped into her mind, “Why do I rarely see boobies openly show themselves off in our society?”. This pair of pendulous breasts could not answer, but Laura quickly turned into Raven for confirmation. Surprisingly, Raven returned her with an equivalently naked breast picture. “We should let more people have the chance to show their titties.” And so it was, the journey of hunting, photographing, nudging, listening and curating, all started from here, this eighty-square-meters apartment and two naked breast pictures.
Show me your titties at night
On 17 December, I was standing in front of over 60 sets of boobies somewhere near Witte de With Straat. Witnessing those silenced breasts hanging on the wall, articulating their attitude and speech towards structured gender norms. I was watching the audacity of those people in the shot peeling off clothes as if from the societal gaze. Their scars, smiles, confidence, and hesitations echoed with 60 sets of shining individualistic dreams.
The dream came awake on a casual Friday night, where you saw young college students hang out with their friends who shared a similar pattern of the dress: neat and wide trousers, dark sweaters, loose coats, which all unconsciously shaped their liberated casualness identity. You saw these groups take off from cars, bikes and scooters, ring the bell and then squeeze themselves into this wooden door situated on the ground floor. Then they headed upstairs to this underground exhibition where you could see posters of breasts shaking themselves off along the corridor. When you finally climbed up to the top floor, you would find Laura and Raven standing there, in front of the entrance of their hidden palace. They constantly greeted and hugged friends and strangers. At that moment, you realized the exhibition was not only about titties. By means of titties, they found a perfect way to party, communicate, socialize, and connect. Once you had finalized your contribution to the exhibition, Laura would use a titties-sticker to temporality seal the sight of your phone camera. After all, this event was only available to biological human eyes to protect the already vulnerable human titties.
Make your exhibition at home
The curation was divided into four main rooms. The largest living room, two small bedrooms where Laura and Raven resided, and a corridor connected them all. The photography colonized all the walls and doors without description. Only the pictures themselves murmuring the stories. If you walk inside those two hosts’ bedrooms, those two beds remind you of all the mundane events you would have in your personal daily life. They were supposed to be secret, closed, and protected. Now they opened their door to the friends and strangers, with dangling boobies on the walls expressing their ambitious yet caring point of view. The crowds, the beds, the alcohol, the boobies on the wall, they sewed the dynamic of their own. It all reminded me of the moment in 1969 in Amsterdam, when John Lennon and Yoko Ono struck the world with Bed-ins for the peace movement. Instead of putting “HAIR PEACE” and “BED PEACE” on the window, Raven and Laura carefully curated the pictures made on their own. Friends at this time are no longer singing “Give Peace A Chance”; instead, they are sitting and standing comfortably around the analog photos. The sounds of sipping wine, chatting, laughing created a new song for “Give Titties A Chance”.
Looking through all the photos, you would find they were topless figures with the head cropped out. At that time, the solid reason behind such a decision remained unclear to me, but they provided a chance to protect the privacy of each participant. Besides, it created a focus for the theme of the collection, the breast and the nipples, without the disruption of the human faces intensifying the bias that already existed in our minds. It also helped the imagination flow. You would start to investigate the stories behind each photo. What happened to the body? Why did they choose to shape the hair in this way? What was the narrative behind each tattoo? Sooner or later, a “Venus de Milo” would appear in your mind with a scent of unreachable mystery.
I picked up three photos as my personal favorites. The first one was a set of cut breasts, where you could clearly see the scars from stitches. The pictures looked painful yet determined. I asked Laura what was the story behind it. She said the “person” in the picture found out their sexuality as non-binary. They thought their breasts put too much emphasis on their gender role as women. Thus they chose to cut it off, to give themselves the freedom of transiting from the pronoun of “her” to “they”.
Another picture was of a girl who openly stripped her cloth off on a public beach. Apparently, it was not a nude beach, as you could tell from the background where the clothing garment faded into hues. But she stripped it off, confidently showing her breasts away. The breasts rushed out of the bathing suit with joy and satisfaction. After all, they had been kept hidden in those covers for too long.
The third picture was of a male couple lying on the bed. The lights covered their bodies like lightweight silk, with their chest hair blatantly showing off. One trimmed that hair into the shape of a heart, the other one hollowed out the central chest hair, and thus an “empty heart” appeared. The heart-shaped emptiness was covered with the thin bushes around the nipples, waiting for the heart from the other side to click. Later, I was told the persons in the pictures were not a couple. They created a scenario for this shot as if this was their pseudo-event. My imagination was defeated by reality.
As I was hanging around the room, Raven came to me with astonishment on her face. “Can you believe it? My neighbor downstairs, a lady over 80 years old, wants to join our exhibition. I am so excited!” And then you saw an old lady walked in the room, with her back arched a bit forward. She slowly moved towards the exhibition, and her eyes were apparently filled with excitement. Probably she was thinking the same as I was, “Give Titties A Chance”.
Tender night, swift goodbye
As the night got quieter and tenderer, I finished my cigarette and was ready to farewell the friends before dived into the ruthless Dutch winter wind. The image of nipples and breasts flashed back in my mind, they made me curious. The curiosity for their audacity of showing their breasts off. The curiosity for their determination of rebellion against unreasonable societal constructs and norms. The curiosity for all those precious individual stories that were inherited inside each beautiful and unique body. As I was seeking the answer to my curiosity, I walked into the coatroom and was ready to pick up my puffer jacket. To my surprise, the hanger there could no longer stand the unbearable heaviness of all those coats and enthusiasm tonight. It fell and dropped. The journey of retrieving my jacket became rather complicated, as it was discovering each individualistic story behind it.
The other day, the exhibition ended with a harsh lockdown commanded by the Dutch government. Those titties are again being tightly kept inside the box/closet. They will expose themselves sometime again, for each precious individualistic dream.
