Beauty Pageant Highlights Plight of Landmine Survivors
By Sara Bonisteel
FoxNews.com
Out of the ashes of war will rise a beauty queen.
Ten women will show off their beauty and brains — and their landmine injuries — in Angola next April in a competition to win a golden prosthetic limb and the title of Miss Landmine 2008.
The project, created by Norwegian theater director Morten Traavik, is designed to raise awareness of the plight of landmine survivors. Contestants will have to demonstrate their skills and take part in an interview, though the details have yet to be finalized.
“There is no sensationalistic intentions within Miss Landmine,” Traavik said. “Of course the format has been chosen because it’s obviously a very media friendly forum, but it still is based very, very much on local culture, since beauty pageants are such a consistent phenomenon in Angolan contemporary culture.”
[SNIP]
“We tend to associate beauty pageants with sleaze and exploitation of women and so on, but this felt very different. This was much more of a celebration, much more of a carnival-esque in many ways,” he said of his first pageant experience in Angola.
[SNIP]
Last November, the women were flown to the Angolan capitol, where they participated in a photo shoot ahead of the pageant.
“They really had great fun,” Traavik said, noting “it was something even a bit deeper: about being able to shine and being treated as someone good-looking, beautiful, flashy and funky — all the kind of things that usually are not attributed to such a group of people.”
For their work, the women were paid $200 a day and given the clothing and jewelry they wore for the shoot. (more…)
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Competing (based on looks) for a prosthetic leg is tasteless in my opinion. Instead of giving them $200 for showing up to take photos THAT WILL BENEFIT HIS (Traavik’s) NAME IN THE ART COMMUNITY, why not take that same money and put it towards buying all of these women the prosthetic leg?
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