Valencia (EFE).- The Fallera García Lorca-Oltà commission from Valencia has decided this year to raise awareness about breast cancer with a falla with the figure of a naked woman showing the scars of her mastectomy, inspired by Cristina Gómez, a young fallera who has suffered from the disease and has shared her experience on social media.
“At first I thought it was going to be anonymous, without a face,” Cristina Gómez recounts in statements to EFE TV, but the fallero artist Raúl Martínez, known as Chuky, convinced her that the best thing was to use her image to show “a story real, someone who exists and who has lived it”.
The result is the falla titled “Pit” (chest in Valencian), which presents a large central figure of a nude woman, holding a red heart in her right hand and her left arm raised showing the scars of her mastectomy.
Cristina Gómez, the central image of the ruling on breast cancer
The fallero artist has reported that Cristina contacted him to make a reproduction of her chest, but after “many conversations” about the importance of the work that the young woman was doing to spread her disease on social networks, Chuky He proposed to be the central image of the falla.
“I didn’t think about it much and I said: ‘Let’s get to it,'” recalls Cristina Gómez about her reaction to the proposal by the Fallas artist, who at the Fallas festivities in 2021 already managed to make another of her monuments go viral, the lesbian kiss of two women dressed as falleras as the central figure of a protest falla in Torrent (Valencia).
From the result, the young woman assures that her first impression was “shocking” and she was left in a state of “shock” to see her naked body exposed, but she also felt a “great emotion” that was enriched by the large number of messages of support that received after the disclosure of his story. “It terrifies me that so many people have been through this,” she says.
Normalize this type of bodies
Cristina Gómez defends that this type of body must be “normalized” and that “we must not be frightened, nor feel fear or rejection”, while recalling that there is also male breast cancer, which must be given greater visibility.
“It’s a tough story that I want to convey with respect and affection,” he says. He also assures that he cannot “stop smiling” at the result of the failure because he believes that “something very nice” has been achieved.
The fallero artist explains that in addition to the central image inspired by Cristina, the fallas scene is complemented with advice and a complaint about the problems that cancer patients have to find work or the economic cost that surrounds the entire process, such as buying clothes or wigs.
“In the end, the falla is a critical element that we have to show on the street, something that we want to burn and it is like a new birth, a start,” says Martínez, who with this has already had fifteen social projects represented in his fallas monuments. , four of them for the García Lorca-Oltà Fallas commission.
