drawings

The diptych was inspired by this quote:

Genesis 6:1-2
“When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose (…).”

The sons of God are depicted in the apocryphal Gospels of Enoch as angels who, after falling in love with the daughters of men, descended on Earth in order to entrust to the human beings the secrets of astrology, metalworking and alchemy. But what if God also had daughters?

In my vision, the daughters of humans become daughters of God. Why? At the Synod of Macon in 585, the question of whether or not women would have to be transformed into men during the resurrection of the flesh, so that they could enter Paradise, was discussed. On the same occasion, it was found that:

  “mulierem hominem vocitari non posse”

“Women could not be called human beings.” If they were not human, they belonged to the sphere of the animal or of the harmful supernatural.

My work is an exploration of the feminine vs. masculine in the light of norm, deviation and otherness. Following Aristotle and later Galen, the “one sex model” implied (beginning with Antiquity, through the Middle Ages and until the eighteenth century) that the woman was an “inverted” or a “lesser” man. Her anatomy, an inverse equivalent of the male anatomy, was thought to justify her submission to the man. The feminine was, according to Thomas Laqueur, for a long time in history the inferior, the abnormal and the evil — in other words “the perennial other” — while the masculine was associated with authority and with the divine.