Backlash As Artist Erects 108-Foot Vagina Sculpture On Brazilian Hillside

An artist's 108-foot (33m) vagina sculpture on a hillside in Brazil has sparked backlash.

Juliana Notari unveiled the piece on New Year's Eve, sharing snaps on social media of the mammoth vulva sculpture, which took 11 months to build.

Juliana said the sculpture, named 'Diva', had 'revived the historic and cultural landscape at this point in the Mata Sul Pernambucana', in the northeast of the country.

Juliana Notari

Sharing photos of Diva, she said: "Amid so many rocks in the middle of this dystopian year, I finally finish the year with Diva ready!!

"It was a long process, almost 11 months of a lot of persistence, coexistence and learning. Diva after all is a big hand made sculpture.

"As Roberto [Gatis] - the engineer responsible for the work - demonstrated, he could not use [an] excavator, because it would not allow him to accurately carve the reliefs [the artwork] needed.

"So it was over 40 hands to make Diva rise, over twenty men working in a heroic effort under the sun, amid a lot of music and joking."

Juliana Notari

She continued: "Diva is a Land Art, a massive vulva excavation measuring 33 meters high, by 16 meters wide and 6 meters deep, covered by armed concrete and resin.

"In Diva, I use art to dialogue with issues that refer to gender issues from a female perspective combined with a cosmopocentric and anthropocentric western society.

"Currently these issues have become increasingly urgent. After all, it is by changing perspective of our relationship between humans and [between] humans and nonhuman, that will allow us to live longer on that planet and in a less unequal and catastrophic society."

Juliana Notari

A lot of people didn't seem to think the increasing urgency of gender issues from a female perspective justified the huge hole in the hill though.

Commenting on her post, one person said: "Ruining a landscape for this is criminal."

Another said: "I'm a woman, and that's not even what I am. I would be ashamed to walk with my family in a place that had something like that."

A third said: "You are very stupid or very naïve, talking about vulva and vagina is important, to get the taboo out of talking about and understanding our bodies, but this needs to be done right and digging a giant red hole in the ground is far from teaching or inclusive, you are not doing anything for women."

Juliana Notari

Ouch. Still, I'm sure Juliana can handle the criticism; after all, art is inherently subjective.

Just watch where you're going next time you're on a ramble in Mata Sul Pernambucana, or you could become the first person to sprain their ankle in a giant vagina.

Topics: World News, Art, Brazil

Jake Massey

Jake Massey is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from Newcastle University, where he learnt a bit about media and a lot about living without heating. After spending a few years in Australia and New Zealand, Jake secured a role at an obscure radio station in Norwich, inadvertently becoming a real-life Alan Partridge in the process. From there, Jake became a reporter at the Eastern Daily Press. Jake enjoys playing football, listening to music and writing about himself in the third person.

@jakesmassey