A performance created by the artistic and activist collaboration of Argentine and Croatian artists problematises sex work.
Society exploits and enjoys in sex work to the same extent to which it moralises and despises it. Prostitution becomes a complex world in which economics, gender, relations of power, class and “choice” intersect. A sex service implies paying for sex with money. However, who actually plays the real price? The clients or the sex workers with their social status, legal security and other risks of this job.
Yira, yira is a performance produced in collaboration with four sex workers from Argentina. Through their stories sex work is spoken about as a personal choice or set of circumstances, about the economy and market, margins and centres of power, wishes and realities. To speak about work through the prism of sex work opens up the unconventional dimension of the discussion about the conditions of work, the principles of equality, morality, marginalisation and social responsibility about which both politics and theory and feminism and employment law stumble over. The performance is title Yira, yira referring to a word which in slang in Spanish in Argentina means walking down the street looking for clients.
Sex is one of the most intimate of human experiences. Permeating our strengths, fears and weaknesses, sex is our mirror. Freethinking about sex is repressed by religion and social norms and therefore it is no surprise that sex work is stigmatised in public. Prostitution represents a thin line which divides the bed from the front door, a hotel room from the family table and an everyday personality from sexuality hidden in a paid-for embrace. Sex workers fulfil the hidden sex desires of clients, with their specific talents and guaranteed discretion.