About girls / by Dermis León
 
Taking place in Havana, “Big girls also cry” for the first time brings together the work of two female artists from different backgrounds and countries. Sandra Ramos (Cuban) and Eugenia Vargas Pereira (Chilean) have something in common. Their work has been a consistent crossing of limits between multimedia and performativity, as well as the questioning of the female body’s position in photography and other media.  
 
While Sandra has pushed forward the idea of traditional engraving, such as mixing techniques from photography, sculptures, painting, video animation and drawing, her subject or “alter-ego” remains the “same girl” in a Cuban elementary school uniform. In her series of photos Good girls don’t shoot, Eugenia presents the fairytale character little red riding hood as a sexy woman, empowered with a big gun, a masculine symbol in the middle of a constructed dystopian landscape. 

Both artists move in the direction of a “narrative”, a story, and temporality (existence of the event recorded in a fluid sequence of time). There is a scenography facet and the complexity of staging, “thinking” about the process of constructing images. 

Sandra and Eugenia were inspired by fairytales in literature, in which their heroines are taking the lead role in a strong and risky situation. They are “girls in transit,” located in a world of dreams or displacement, outside “home”, whatever this unfamiliar and uncanny word means today. We are confronted by the same child, suspended into a space of fantasy, with the gaze of a strong, grown-up woman. Do they cry when we are not looking? 
Nevertheless, they portray archetypes of a historical representation of the women-girl, contextualized in an uncertain dystopian landscape that could be the world in which we are living today.