Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Artwork

Ma soeur cent têtes is a feminist stencil project by the Viennese media and performance artist Maria Hera. "I love to empower and encourage women through my art. As a young art student I suddenly became aware, that all of my heroes, role models, the characters from books and movies I identified with, where men. All the stories, all the adventures, all the achievements weren't really meant for me, didn't really tell MY story, didn't really show my experience. So I began to search for female role models in art, science, politics and so on. First I just drew them, read their biographies, tired to find their secret message within their images. But I wanted more, I wanted visibility and attention for my heroines, for all female heroines of all times. So in summer 2012 I started to create stencils out of the images of these sisters of my heart and spray them all over Vienna as well as the cities I travelled to. Accompanied by a QR-code, one could scan the code linked to the english Wikipedia site of each woman to access the information about her accomplishments and thus shape this outstanding women out of the mists of history and give them not only an image, but a loud voice. On http://masoeurcenttetes.weebly.com one can find a documentation of each stenciled woman, sorted by name, year and place. In the same year I also started to give workshops on the project, where I am talking about the project itself, the stenciled women, urban hacking as a tool to arise awareness and teaching the technique of stenciling. This led to presentations of the project at a Gender Studies Conference at the University of Salzburg or the Austrian Cultural Forum, the cover of a scientific publication as well as the paper-bag project "Heroin to go!" Now I'd love to bring all thous heroines into the houses and the lives of people all over the world! We all need to remember that as men AND woman we are here on this planet to create TOGETHER a beautiful, abundant, healthy place to live! So it is time to remember and reintegrate the power of women, not only into society but into ourselves, no matter the gender we are born in. We all are children of a mother, of a woman who taught us everything we needed, a brilliant woman, a powerful woman, gracious woman. We all have this female archetype within us and we need to honor and cultivate this glorious part within us and others.