Maria Riot

Maria Riot lives in Barcelona, Spain. She is a sex worker, sex workers' rights activist and artist. She is the author of Archivo puta, a multidisciplinary project that seeks to create archives of the present and search for archives of the past of sex workers, as well as to recover the memory, make visible the beauty and resistance of the collective.

 

With the photographic project, she seeks to create an archive of the present, since due to the stigma, many sex workers decide to hide and although there are artistic projects about sex work, there are very few that are made by sex workers themselves or without a morbid gaze, with ethics and political context.

 

Thus, it seeks to challenge the existing gaze of society towards sex workers, but also that of photography and art in general. It foregrounds the agency of the person being portrayed and makes it visible that the person taking the photographs also shares the same labour activity and stigma, something that does not usually happen in the world of photography, where art, due to its lack of accessibility and resources, is not usually made by sex workers on a massive scale and our stories and visual narratives are told by others.

 

This work makes us ask what is the genealogy of images and their relationship to power: who decides what can be represented in an image? Who manages the prison of forbidden images?