An artist has provoked outrage this week after creating a 108-foot-high vagina sculpture on a hill near her house.
According to a recent report by the Daily Mirror, the project was the work of a Brazilian artist named Juliana Notari, who spent a grand total of 11 months building the gigantic, bright-red vulva, (nicknamed "Diva") before proudly unveiling it on New Year's Eve.
Juliana shared three pictures of the completed artwork: a 108-foot (33-metre) reinforced concrete vagina, which was installed at a rural art park near the site of a disused sugar mill in Mata Sul Pernambucana in northeast Brazil.
In a lengthy caption, Juliana wrote: "Amid so many rocks in the middle of this dystopian year, I finally finish the year with Diva ready!! [sic]"
She continued: "It was a long process, almost 11 months of a lot of persistence, coexistence, and learning. Diva after all is a big handmade sculpture.
"As Roberto [Gatis] - the engineer responsible for the work - demonstrated, he could not use [an] excavator, because it would not allow him to accurately carve the reliefs [the artwork] needed.
"So it was over 40 hands to make Diva rise, over 20 men working in a heroic effort under the sun, amid a lot of music and joking."
She added:
"In Diva, I use art to dialogue with issues that refer to gender issues from a female perspective combined with a cosmopocentric and anthropocentric western society.
"Currently these issues have become increasingly urgent. After all, it is by changing perspective of our relationship between humans and [between] humans and nonhuman, that will allow us to live longer on that planet and in a less unequal and catastrophic society."
However, the project has divided opinion on social media, with many branding the artwork lewd and inappropriate, while others regarding it as transphobic.
For example, in the comments of Juliana's post, one person wrote: "Ruining a landscape for this is criminal."
Another said: "I'm a woman, and that's not even what I am. I would be ashamed to walk with my family in a place that had something like that."
A third added: "You are very stupid or very naïve, talking about vulva and vagina is important, to get the taboo out of talking about and understanding our bodies, but this needs to be done right and digging a giant red hole in the ground is far from teaching or inclusive, you are not doing anything for women."
However, Brazilian journalist Fabiana Moraes has stepped in to defend Juliana, replying: "Not every woman has a vagina, it's true. but the woman of Juliana's work has it. The work does not undermine other women, just as women who do not have a vagina do not undermine my existence."
