Filmed in Bruxelles.
A woman places a poster in public space with a phone number and the caption "Women Pissers Wanted!". Eight women answer the ad and go to the meeting point: an abandoned basement where a "strategist" waits for them. The strategist gives each woman an envelope containing the coordinates of the places where to intervene by performing a particular act: urinating in the space to leave a mark and to territorialize it. Mark by mark, they territorialize the entire city of Brussels. Will the effect of gender appropriation spread to all the cities of the planet?
Director Alice Salimbeni 'In this film, the other co-authors and I sought to explore and represent the feeling of being out of place in the public space of the city of Brussels, as women. To do so, we put ourselves in the position of the Foucauldian "potentia" instead of the "potestas" and we wrote an ironic and parodic urban tale to comprehend our urban feelings. Considering that in Brussels there are many possibilities to urinate standing up (urinals, hidden corners, bars) and few possibilities to do it sitting down (toilets, bars) we have identified the act of urinating as a symbolic container. Urinating in the street means laying bare one's body and not respecting the rules of common living and at the same time it means feeling in a position of power strong enough to be able to do so. Urinating is also a symbolic act that metaphorically evokes the territorialization of the space in which this act is performed. Given the greater ease of men to practice this act, in the film we subvert reality, we identify meaningful spaces that express gender inequalities in Brussels, and we stage a collective act consisting of serial “urban piss-ups" to conquer the city.
With the act of urinating, the video represents an exemplification of the denial of a right through a scenario in which that right is distorted, sarcastically acquired by those who do not hold it, and then ironically put into practice.'