“Girls should walk alone in the streets! Girls shouldn’t be afraid at night! ”
A proposal for a manifesto on the hardships of being a growing young woman in Turkey. The 31-point manifesto takes its references from the Girls Manifesto section of the book Venus by the writer Şebnem İşigüzel. The manifesto in the book underlines basic human rights in a literary manner. The project reinterprets the manifesto using 31 painted graphic images that illustrate each point. The images are bound into a 31-page book. Venus has not yet been translated into English but by making drawings from it, the work interprets the manifesto as a visual language that can be understood by anyone. The graphic images that depict each point in the Manifesto are derived from the silhouettes of well-known comic characters by prominent Turkish female illustrators, including but not limited to Ramize Erer and Piyale Madra, or taken from comic books and magazines which comment on feminism, womanhood, femininity, the understanding of morality, and sensitivities in a conservative society.
