Radio and television announcer, Liv Strömquist combines her role as a journalist with that of a comic book author. A firm activist in areas such as feminism or the right to asylum, Strömquist has become one of the most popular firms in Swedish comics and a successful author outside her country thanks to titles such as The Forbidden Fruit or I Feel Nothing. Now comes, in Spanish and Catalan, La sala de losmirros (Reservoir Books) / Dins la sala dels miralls (Editorial Finestres), an atypical graphic essay, funny and fierce at the same time, about the ideal of feminine beauty and sexuality as a consumer item.
Through five chapters, The Hall of Mirrors is a courageous study of the body and sexuality as a consumer good. A story about stereotypes and the ideal of female beauty through the centuries that questions the contemporary world and invites us to look at it critically.
Strömquist says that The Hall of Mirrors was born from his own experience with Instagram. Mobile phones have made our image omnipresent and its maximum expression is Instagram. Our body is portrayed and exposed in a network that serves to share and compete. Strömquist confirms this and reflects on it, taking as a starting point the case of the influencer Kylie Jenner; From there, she goes back in time and delves into the causes that explain our collective obsession with beauty, image and the desire to emulate other lives.
Displaying an irreverent pop encyclopedicism, the Swedish author combines quotes from Simone Weil, the Bible or Zygmunt Bauman in her essay, and evokes everything from Marilyn Monroe's last photo shoot to Empress Sissi's slim waist, including the Flintstones, Charlemagne, Kim Kardashian, Snow White or Susan Sontag's essays on photography. From the latter she takes her concept of chronic voyeurism, if in Sontag's time that concept was applied to the vision we had of the world, now it is applied to ourselves. "Today everything exists to end up in a photograph," Sontag wrote. She did it in the 70s, but the phrase seems written to define today.
From the French philosopher René Girard he takes the theory of the mediator and adapts it to the contemporary world. Girard maintains that the human being does not know what he wants and needs a model, which is what he calls a mediator. That mediator gives value to the thing when he uses it, and his prescriptive capacity will increase the more famous he is. Strömquist relies on these postulates to point out that we all contribute to this mediation from the moment we buy the same type of clothing or use the same type of mobile. So, it is the collective that makes something desirable.
Graphically, Strömquist presents a cartoonish and synthetic drawing, enhanced with flat and contrasting colors that give it an irreverent aesthetic very much in keeping with his discourse away from conventions. To highlight the author's work with the texts, that is, with the typography, which are part of the plastic proposal of this essay. A game of shapes and letters that turns the translation of this comic into a true editorial challenge. Challenge passed with good marks by the publishers of the book, both in Spanish and Catalan. Liv Strömquist's works allow us to understand our present and The Hall of Mirrors is perhaps her best work to date.
