Jacques Lacan obscured L’origine du monde behind a sliding wooden panel, marked by an engraving embellishing its surface, designed by his friend Andre Masson to censor and conceal the voyeurism of the painting. In the act of hiding what is too formidable to be seen, the vagina is transformed from a body part into a mythologisation: the birthplace of psychoanalysis.

The wooden coffin served as the cage of the painting for 26 years; for even longer, woman remained the object in androcentric architectures of humankind, consigned as an absolute “other” in the phallocentric dialectic.

Not something to be hidden by a Lacanian panel, not static but active, it is a body as a medium through which we inhabit the world. Origo Alia (On Another Origin) explores the way women escape L’objet petit a status, reclaiming a way to become subjects of their own lives.