On a mild Tuesday night, a few hours before midnight, a dozen women assemble outside the Argentine métro stop in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, loaded down with a melange of tote bags, backpacks, and plastic buckets. They come from all directions but find and greet each other easily, and within minutes the process has started. Some pour powdered glue into buckets while others add water from bottles. The unluckiest in the group mix the cold slurry by hand.
Nearly every night since August, in some part of the city, women have been gathering in groups of two or three to paste on public walls black-and-white slogans demanding that the French government act to prevent femicide—the murder of women by their current or ex-partners—as well as other acts of violence against women. Despite the government’s promises last year to enact change, the women believe that those promises are empty.
The slogans vary, but the style is always the same. Black paint on white paper, pasted with the wheat glue mixture in long lines on public walls.. We are all heroines.. We’ll stop pasting when you stop raping us. The group prefers to paste in hard-to-reach areas, like overpasses or high above windows—climbing on top of trash cans, scurrying up window ledges, or on rare occasions toting ladders under their arms—because their work is frequently torn down or defaced by the next day.
Raphaëlle, dressed in sweats, sneakers, and a scarf , climbs onto a window ledge with a paintbrush in hand and a bucket of glue at her feet while her friend Pauline quickly hands her page after page. As she brushes glue over paper, patting each piece down with a hard, a group of three men smoking cigarettes outside of a bar take notice. The men giddily shout out their best guesses for what the resulting message would be, a misbegotten game of.
While there have been a few instances of women being fined or threatened by police, none of the Colleuses in France have been arrested yet. When people pass them on the street, they are met with either curiosity or anger. One landlady pokes her head out a window as Pauline and Raphaëlle work—she’s angry that they’re defacing the wall of her building. The pair explain the urgency of the slogans and why it’s important that they continue.
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