FASTING GIRLS De Marta Azparren

Fasting girls proposes a possible cartography of voluntary fasting as one of the symptoms of the contemporary tendency toward disappearance within the image, from the Victorian Fasting girls or “hunger artists” to contemporary TikTok “fasters.”

The Fasting girls project invites reflection on the relationship between hunger and images as a form of nourishment, even if only symbolically, in order to rethink voluntary fasting not so much as a clinical diagnosis of an individual illness, but as a collective symptom. The project proposes examining the capacity of digital images to feed hybrid pixel-flesh bodies—bodies as saturated with images as they are empty of food.

Ultimately, it aims to contribute to the demedicalization of what we call anorexia in these metamorphosing bodies and to understand it as a collective reaction to excess gravity, to excess presence: a shared process of common mutation.