CHANTAL
PINZI
Italy
Shred the Patriarchy
Shred the Patriarchy focuses on the stories of the Moroccan women who practice skateboarding despite the hard social and family repercussions they suffer for this choice. Their rebel spirits transform skateboarding into a form of resistance to patriarchy.
The international reputation of Morocco as a reformist and progressive country is contradictory to the significant obstacles faced by women. Their social, economic and political participation, as well as participation in sports, is still minimized or completely denied. Skateboarding is no exception. If you are a woman you should not practice it.
Many of these women were raised with conservative parents. The most important thing was to become a good Muslim, the rest was not important. Their dreams and their wills, particularly that of skating, have been oppressed by a system that fails to understand the benefits and the importance of those values as acceptance, empathy and unity shared within the skate community.
In a skatepark, girls can safely play at the top of their lungs and children of different backgrounds can play together by creating ties that transcend differences in color, religion and social background.
The stereotypes that have made skateboarding a domain of gender require these women to make a radical choice between their traditions and the sub-culture, forcing them to abandon the walls of their homes for living their own chosen life. The women of Shred the Patriarchy are brave examples of how an apparently simple object, a piece of wood with wheels, enables them to realize and confirm their identities by giving them the ability to stand up every time they fall in life, just like they do when they fall off a skateboard.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Chantal Pinzi (b. 1996) is an Italian freelance photographer currently based in Berlin, Germany. Chantal studied documentary photography at the University of Applied Sciences Europe in Berlin and collaborated in Columbia with photojournalist Henry Agudelo. Her work highlighting social injustices has been published in magazines such as Il Reportage, Eyesopen!, and Doogreporter, and has been awarded Maghreb Photography Awards, Prize of Huffpost Italia, and Contemporarte UHU.
