ABSTRACT
In a series of photographs called El Zapallo (“The Pumpkin”), Argentinian artist, Ilse Fusková, represents a model who is in her fifties posing naked with a split pumpkin in front of her genitals. Interpreting the series as defying norms about female beauty and disrupting the workings of the gaze, Maria Laura Rosa observes that the making of El Zapallo in 1982 was at the start of a reinvigoration of the feminist movement that would follow a change in government and the return of democracy. Apart from addressing a politics of the body and its representation, the work is intricately bound up with discourses about the Great Goddess. While Fusková's actual reading on the Great Goddess was subsequent to the completion of the series, Rosa notes that it is possible to see a correlation between the interests of artists in different contexts who, regardless of their formal knowledge of the Great Goddess movement, sought alternative images of women by linking the feminine to fertility, nature and mythical creation.
