Ana Mazzei and Regina Parra’s performance and installation Ofélia is titled after the fictional character Ophelia from the play Hamlet, written by William Shakespeare (1564–1616) between the 16th and the 17th centuries. The character of Ophelia became a symbol of fragile and irrational femininity, and was used as a reference to hysteria, a fictitious illness conceived in the 19th century by the French physician Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), who was also responsible for the famous Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Ophelia became the typical image of the “crazy” woman, in opposition to the supposed rationality of the male characters of Shakespearean tragedy. In the play, Ophelia is a young noblewoman, in love with the protagonist Hamlet, who finds herself amid political and affective disputes that plague her mind and her spirit, leading her to mental degradation and an iconic suicide adorned with flowers and water—a scene widely represented in the history of art. But for Mazzei and Parra, it is not the morbid image of the female body floating in water that makes Ophelia’s history interesting, but the fragments of her monologues and dialogues, which are indexes of the progressive erosion of her subjectivity due to her status as a plaything for the men in her life. Starting from this symbolic reference, the artists perform a silent march in which nine women carry wooden plates bearing written fragments selected from Ophelia’s speeches from the beginning to the end of the play. Withdrawn from their original context, these phrases are mistaken as slogans, threats, or indications of submission and dependence. In this silent procession, the wooden pieces serve as either banners or as battle shields. Some women display small objects that recall “cold” weapons, in the imminence of a confrontation with the public. The performance lies at the threshold of theater—one of the artists’ main references—and a political demonstration, in which the figure of Ophelia is reenacted no longer as an alienated and passive character, but as a presence that returns to disturb the order and patriarchy.
— Talita Trizoli, postdoctoral researcher, IEB-USP, 2019