Barcelona (Spain), 2021

Confinement does not always have bars. Sometimes, it is transparent—so perfect in its form that it seems not to exist. But the most brutal oppression is the one that settles into the skin, imprisoning without chains, suffocating without leaving a trace. Glez is inside. White covers her and domesticates her. Her immaculate, long, serene dress is a symbol of imposed purity, of learned submission. It is not just the glass that holds her back but the mold in which she has been confined. A garment that evokes the Adelitas, the revolutionary women, and The Broken Column by Frida Kahlo. The female body—trapped in expectations, turned into a fragile object, watched.

Stillness turns into suffocation. Glez clings to the dress, twists it, shakes it. Her tense hands seek to tear away the invisible. The Cage tightens. Her eyes scan the space, searching for an exit that does not exist. Anxiety grows, and the air thickens. In the tension of the scene, female strength rebels, seeking to break free from all the violence endured. The echo of her rage reverberates against the glass. How do you escape the imposed? How do you flee from what you have been taught to accept? Actual imprisonment does not end with escape. Around her, the glass begins to crack, fragments falling—mute witnesses to all the prisons still left to shatter.

The impact of the performance is captured in images—fragments of a silent struggle that persists beyond the moment. The Cage breaks, but the memory of confinement remains inscribed in the body and history.

Glass Cage is a visual cry against the invisible oppression weighing on female bodies. Glez materializes the social and symbolic confinement that women have inherited, forcing a confrontation with what is assumed to be natural. Her work does not merely expose the prison—it shatters it, opening space for a new narrative in which the body is no longer an object but a territory of resistance and liberation.

María Pérez Marín