Stop Telling Women to Smile: What Street Harassment Looks Like in Mexico City Erica Schwiegershausen - NYMag.com
go to original February 10, 2015

The Art Project (Fusion)

In 2012, Brooklyn-based artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh started the interactive art series "Stop Telling Women to Smile" to document women's response to street harassers. Since then, she’s re-created the project in U.S. cities including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta; now, for the first time, she’s taking the series abroad, to Mexico – a country with one of the highest rates of violence against women in the world.

A new Fusion feature produced by Anna Holmes follows Fazlalizadeh on a six-day trip to Mexico City, where she speaks with local women about their experiences with street harassment, sketches their portraits, and wheat-pastes hand-drawn posters depicting the women responding to their harassers across the city. The resulting project is titled All the Time. Every Day. and features video testimonials from 76 different people — including female students, mothers, politicians, police officers, and even a few men — recounting their daily encounters with public sexual harassment in Mexico City.

Their accounts are disturbing: A 2010 United Nations report ranked Mexico as the worst country in the world for sexual violence against women, estimating that 44 percent of women living there have suffered some form of sexual violence. “I wanted to find out: What do women in Mexico City go through?” Fazlalizadeh said. “What are their stories? How’s what they experience different from what I experience?”

Watch the video above for a closer look at Fazlalizadeh’s process, or head over to Fusion to see the full project.

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