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ii) The second stage of the exhibition showed visitors a map (below) of the world with statistics on the different forms of violence against women.
iv) The fourth stage involved a mapping exercise linking press articles to women victims of violence (below).
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i) Visitors began by viewing the chronological frise of the historical journey, the role and place of women in four major historical periods: the Antiquity, the Middle Ages the Middle Ages, the modern era and the contemporary era.
iii) The third stage invited visitors to watch a video of a short play acted by the three curators of the museum portraying situations of physical and verbal violence against women. Authentic and anonymous testimonies referring to real-life situations were read out.
In this video, the students leveraged Aristotle’s rhetorics to illustrate the art of manipulation and seduction in the dominant male character’s communication style and likened it to the Greek scholars and teachers of rhetorics called sophists of which the best known were Protagoras and Georgia. Sophists were itinerant teachers in the fifth century B.C who were well versed in the art of deception and manipulation. The male character in the play uses manipulation to seduce his victims by portraying himself as an exemplary husband and boss when in reality he is a treacherous, perverse and violent man. Palo Alto’s interpersonal communication axioms was evoked to explain how relations between people interacting in a closed circle can become dysfunctional leading to schizophrenia and to other health issues. The interactions between the couple illustrated asymmetrical one-up and one-down communication styles which are evocative of domination-submission relation dynamic. The dominant character and aggressor employed a one-up dialogue towards the victim who was placed in a one-down communication strategy (submission). Palo Alto’s double bind theory in which the victim receives contradictory injunctions was also reflected in the way in which the domineering husband constantly praises his wife’s merits and qualities in his oral discourse when people were around. However, his bodily communication expressed the contrary, anger, and physical threat. iv) The fifth and final stand featured a black gowned mannequin named Lavender. Visitors were asked to answer the following three questions: "What did you find most striking about the exhibition?", "What would you like to see changed in society? What comes to mind when you think about the situation of women in the world? Using post-it notes, visitors wrote down their answers and placed them on the mannequin, thus progressively, the mannequin was decorated with visitors answers and as more visitors came to this stand, they could visualise the patterns formed by the different answers and solutions to the problem of sexism proposed by previous visitors, in a cybernetic fashion.
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