Eva Garibaldi
about
projects
- The Stones Only Appear To Be Non-Living
- Fantastic Glitch Swamp
- Salinarum
- To Be Like Water
- Shifting Ecologies
- The Unstable Ground
- Pillnitz Chronotopes Tour
From sending out job applications to casual daily sexism, empowerment, and the bloody experiences of emptying a menstrual cup—oh, and of course, navigating various situationships.
Girlhood Is a Spectrum is an autoethnographic zine composed of screenshots from group chats, memes, and photos collected over two years. What started as a banal impulse to archive—saving fragments that were too funny, brutally honest, or painfully real to let disappear into the endless scroll—evolved into something more. Through ironic advice, feral messages, and brutally precise descriptions of dates, the author reflects on female friendship and the experience of being a woman in a patriarchal, heteronormative society that constantly tells her what she should be. A confused woman navigating her late twenties with varying degrees of success searching for herself, her community, and her place in society. She experiments, feels emotional, angry, sad, joyful, professional and owns her sexuality.
In curating the content, the author puts it to the Bechdel test—a criterium for analyzing women's representation in film. A story passes the test if it includes at least two women who talk to each other about something other than men. While reviewing the archive, it became strikingly clear how often we unconsciously orbit around patriarchal expectations and how deeply heteronormative patterns are woven into the everyday. This zine plays with coded meanings and playful escapism. The content is at once light, heavy and layered with absurdities that dissolve into humor. Between the lines and pixels, something larger reveals itself, the everyday becomes political, and the act of banal archiving transforms into a means of empowerment.
The zine embraces and exaggerates stereotypes—hyper-feminized details become tools of appropriation. The format follows the dimensions of a smartphone, not just as a medium for collecting content but as a space for constructing (and unraveling) identities. The zine consists of 54 cards; each capturing a fragment of the girlhood experience—each forming a whole while maintaining its autonomy.
* The zine is autobiographical, reflecting solely the experiences of the author and her friends, and does not generalize the experience of women in the world (especially marginalized women). Women are understood as individuals identifying as women.
Photos by Eva Bevec