Fusion
In the fall of 2012, Brooklyn-based artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh launched “Stop Telling Women to Smile,” a project featuring posters with the faces of real women exposed to street harassment, oftentimes in the form of catcalling, paired with powerful quotes underneath. For Fazlalizadeh, the pieces served as a visual tool to directly address both harassers and women who experience harassment in their very own neighborhoods.
This past September, Fazlalizadeh brought “Stop Telling Women to Smile” to Mexico City, where women are subjected to a level of street harassment both pervasive and constant. Its own public transit system has been deemed one of the most dangerous for women in the world, a distinction that has given way to the use of single-sex buses and female-only subway cars in order to combat the city’s notorious harassment issues.
The new interactive, which debuted Monday on Fusion, tells the stories of 72 women, packaged with videos, locations, and a timeline outlining Fazlalizadeh’s time in Mexico City. The abroad iteration is titled “All the Time. Every Day” and features women of all ages–local politicians, students, and mothers included–and narratives detailing instances of verbal harassment and physical touching in public.
“I know that you would do it for free, but I will pay you to suck me off,” Adriana, one of the women included in the interactive, recounts being told by a man once.
“When I walk, I see men seeing me,” Ana, another women, describes. “That gets me really nervous. If you say something, you’re the bad one.”
It’s this sense of powerlessness that “All the Time. Every day” seeks to highlight, providing women a platform to address public abuse too often ignored by their larger community. Check out the project in its entirety at Fusion.
