Boobs in the wind on the street in Bologna. Why do female breasts scandalize and male breasts do not?

It is titled Tits Out the new street art intervention by CHEAP, the urban art project active since 2013 in Bologna, which distinguished itself nationally last summer with the project The Struggle is FICA, which caused much controversy and aroused the ire of the current undersecretary for culture, the leghista Lucia Borgonzoni. The project involves the installation of a series of posters in the streets of the center of Emilia’s capital city, all depicting female breasts of various shapes and sizes.

Tits Out starts with a series of reflections, “When does a little girl’s breast become a breast? Why can a man’s breasts be shown but not a woman’s? Is a woman without breasts less of a woman? When does a trans woman’s breast become a boob that is forbidden to show? Why on social media are women’s nipples censored and not men’s? Why are the breasts of hyper-sexualized women shown on magazine covers or in advertisements but is the breast of a woman breastfeeding a baby girl or baby a problem?” These are the questions CHEAP, through the posters, addresses to the public. The poster is signed in partnership with School of Feminism, a platform dedicated to activism and graphic content production, which returns to Italy with CHEAP after having already produced the “Thank a Feminist” poster intervention in 2019.

The issue of thehyper-sexualization of women’s bodies by the male gaze, the censorship of female nudity in public space (whether it is the street or a digital context matters little) when it is not about marketing but about self-determination, the political and desiring re-appropriation of one’s body: these are the themes that have run through CHEAP’s reflection over the years.

The graphics, texts and photographs that make up the posters are taken from the book Pechos Fuera, published in 2020 in Spain by Zenith: a text in which School of Feminism examines the representation of breasts in the history of art and more contemporary visual communication, accompanying it with political, social and iconographic reflection. It is, CHEAP explains, a n invitation to break the mechanisms of breast censorship, a choral narrative that takes up direct narratives of women who, starting from their own biographical data, question established stereotypes of a sexist culture, one more tool to claim the right to self-determination that, evidently, also passes through the liberation of the nipples.

Research on bodies and feminist energies have always run through CHEAP’s work, and this will be the case for this 2021 as well, which will see the Bologna-based project return active in public space with new interventions, as well as with the return of the international call for artists: the annual invitation to contaminate the city streets addressed to artists? who deal with contemporary visual languages is open for participation until June I, 2021, all information on the official website www.cheapfestival.it.

Below are some images of the project, photos by Margherita Caprilli

Boobs in the wind on the street in Bologna. Why do female breasts scandalize and male breasts do not?

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