The work Castration consists of multiple hair samples from different people and their statements about the horrible thoughts they had.
Hair has multiple symbolical meanings among which the first ones are connected to magical rituals and beliefs. When it’s cut, it was believed that hair is still connected to the head, to be exact, to the soul of a person whose hair that it. Remains of that belief can be found today too – when parents keep strand of hair from the first haircut of their child. Supposedly, in that way the child is kept safe, its soul is guarded. However, since this custom originates from earlier magical rituals, the same strand of hair could be also a cause of death since it represents personification of the person whose hair it is.
On that ground, in this work I am also “keeping” strands of hair from different people, but this is no longer explicitly about magical beliefs. It’s about cutting one’s hair as an act of symbolical castration. This type of castration comes with advent of civilization. The person cuts her hair and with that she puts herself in order, symbolically dismissing her wild side. With castration we dismiss everything that is in modern civilization declared as immoral, wrong, evil, punishable. These include multiple urges and thoughts that we are taught not to embrace, to dismiss them even though they are a part of our nature. The act of cutting hair removes also the urges connected to libido.
Castration displays statements of people who write about these exact, thoughts and urges they have, knowing that they are “wrong” and forbidden to talk about. Next to every statement the strand of hair from that person is exhibited. By cutting these strands I am signifying the castration of those statement, allegedly freeing person from “evil thoughts”. However, even though these thoughts are castrated, the strands of hair still exist as personifications of those people, showing that these statements are still part of them no matter that they were dismissed by cutting.
Tijana Petrović 