Overview
ART DIRECTION
DESIGN
The Art of Redesigning Art
Missing Maja
On March 8, International Women’s Day, women from 70 countries have been called to strike to give visibility to the work they perform. From company workers facing wage gaps to those performing feminized and undervalued tasks.
The most famous woman in the Prado Museum, La Maja by Goya, will not go to work that day. As a sign of support for the strike, we will remove the protagonists of Goya’s paintings «La maja desnuda» and «La maja vestida» from their jobs on March 8.
To make the action go viral, the Museum will exceptionally lift the ban on photographing its works and encourage everyone who visits the museum to take pictures with the paintings of the «majas» and share them with the hashtag: #Lamajatambiénpara.
The intervention is visually flawless: the lines are reconstructed with the same brushstrokes that Velázquez or Goya would have used. But the real power lies in the idea. In how absence becomes a message. In how a national museum gives up its symbolic space to remember what should never have been hidden.
The result is not only visually striking; it is uncomfortable, urgent, necessary. Each altered work makes visible an inequality that is still present: the invisibility of women’s work, role, and legacy in culture.
This project demonstrates that a historical institution can also be an active agent in the present. That art is not only preserved, but also challenged. And that sometimes, the most powerful thing an image can do… is to cease to exist.
