Anatural Project
In Her Head - Illustrated Portraits of Silver Women
How the Anatural project was born
There are many women who are dealing with the issue of whether to dye their white hair. And the hardest part is the intermediate stage, a step that part of the hair is white and the great majority is not. The dilemma that rises for most women: Should I stop dyeing my hair? Should I dye my hair again? Succumbing to social conventions – gray=old age=grandmother, or to keep on with the white hair despite the disrespect?
The exposure to this issue began with a hallway conversation with a colleague, Efrat Jerufi, a few years ago. Marina Manukian saw her walk proudly with white stripes, the same stripes Marina had been hiding for a decade. She referred me to the Facebook group "Gray, Liberated and Beautiful", that contains nearly 20,000 women who are coping with this choice and who support each other in moments of crisis that happen quite a lot. Manukian joined the group, and started the process of stopping to dye my white hair, giving up and starting again until I began to accept myself as I am without filters.
In the visual artist opinion, the subject receives too little attention from those around us, so she decided to create another discourse through the portraits. Marina was looking for a different way than photography to show the change that women go through. In one phone conversation with Efrat Jerufi, she listened and directed me to the best way to describe the change. One of the challenges they faced was how to present the white the hair when the portraits Marina`s draw are black and white. Eventually, they decided to emphasize the things that these women like to do, and draw them instead of the white hair.
On the first of January 2022, the artist started uploading the portraits on the social networks Facebook and Instagram and she did it for two months. The project received positive responses and even participated in a group event that Tal Margalit and Anat Shalev curated to mark International Women's Day.
Later that year, Manukian formed a collaboration with the ProAging movement in Israel, under the direction of Smadar Ganzi. The movement emphasizes a different alternative to women's aging and promotes natural female representation in every possible media. By the agency of models over the age of 45 and who have not undergone chemical intervention, and have not performed plastic surgery, Smadar is leading a social conceptual change towards adolescent women. In our collaboration, the visual artist focused on models who don't dye their hair at all. You'll see them on the first few pages of the book.
During November and until the end of December 2022, the project was privileged to participate in an exhibition marking the status of women in Rishon LeZion. 10 portraits were placed on the 3rd floor of the city hall and at the end of the exhibition were donated to the municipal women's shelter.
The artist feel that the project, which has become her life's project, and it has not yet ended for her, and much more can be done on the subject. In January 2023, the project is renewed and she will upload new portraits of inspiring women to social media every day.
