València (EFE).- The García Lorca-Oltà de València falla has decided this year to raise awareness about breast cancer with the figure of a naked woman who shows the scars of her mastectomy, inspired by Cristina Gómez, a young fallera who has suffered the disease and has shared his experience on social media.
“At first I thought it was going to be anonymous, without a face,” Cristina Gómez recounted in a statement to EFE TV, but the fallero artist Raúl Martínez, known as “Chuky”, convinced her that it was best to use her image to show ” a true story, 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.
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” proposed to be the central image of the failure.
“I didn’t think about it much and I said: let’s get to it,” recalls Cristina Gómez about her reaction to the proposal of the fallero artist, who at the 2021 festivities already managed to make another of his monuments go viral, the lesbian kiss of two women dressed as falleras as a central figure in a claim failure of Torrent (Valencia).
normalize these bodies
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.
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.
A message with complaint
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’s 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.
Soraya Aspas, fallera of this commission, values the idea that the falla pays homage to breast cancer patients as “wonderful” and affirms it “as a woman and as a person”.
“It is a very difficult issue, a very complicated reality, which exists and must be normalized and not hidden,” defends Aspas.
This Fallas monument “proudly shows the people who have been so brave” and have overcome the disease, and also intends to “also raise their voices” for those who have not been able to do so, thanks. EFE