Aimilia A. Theofilopoulos
💜🐺🌸✨

Gender as a weapon and tool

The double-bit axe carries a long history of violence, division, and control. Originally a tool associated with women’s labor and daily life, it was later appropriated by patriarchal systems and transformed into a weapon, an object through which power, conquest, and authority were exercised. Its sharp edges became symbols of separation: between bodies, identities, and forms of belonging.

In this work, the axe is reconstructed in plaster, a material tiedto fragility, care, healing, and repair. Through this transformation, the object enters into a state of dissonance. The once-threatening form becomes vulnerable; the symbol of violence is recast in a medium that can fracture easily. The work destabilizes the assumed permanence and authority of the weapon, exposing the tension between aggression and tenderness, protection and harm.

The surface of the plaster holds traces of pressure, instability, and touch, raising questions about the politics of materiality itself: Who defines the material of the body? Who assigns its value, its durability, or its vulnerability and for what purpose?

The work understands gender as a classificatory weapon, one that disciplines bodies through rigid boundaries and binary structures. These imposed edges frame and contain the body, protecting social order from fluidity, transformation, and the possibility of self-definition beyond normative categories.

By repositioning the double-bit axe away from its weaponized legacy and back toward the margins of care, queerness, and embodiment, the work attempts to reclaim the object from systems of domination. It asks who has the authority to name, to center, and ultimately to control meaning itself.

Format: Scultpure
Material:
Country: Germany
Year: 2026