ANOTHER [AB]NORMAL DAY
by Vitória Gonçalves Morão
Porto Velho city, Rondonia State, Brazil Country, 2019
[Text in English] "I was harassed by a professor in my department. He would call and text me even though he knew I was engaged and had no extra academic interest in him. The teacher only stopped calling me when I threatened to denounce him, but from then on he began to harass me in the classroom, giving me lower grades than my classmates and not giving me a turn to participate. That teacher ended up being denounced for other reasons, by other students, but the denouncements did not generate consequences."
- Former Student
Another [Ab]normal Day is an urban intervention carried out on the premises of the University of Rondônia in Brazil. The installation featured 12 posters of women's silhouettes with anonymous stories, exposing sexism, harassment and abuse within academia. The silhouette symbolises the ways that assault can strip away a person's sense of identity. Assaults often originate from positions of power, where the existing system suppresses the voices of survivors, undermines their accounts, and fails to provide adequate protection for them to come forward and speak out. This piece says that enough is enough. Now is the time to speak up.
Vitória Morão is a visual artist with a degree in Visual Arts from the Federal University of Rondônia herself.