La Natural is a video series that explores the evolution of feminism through cinematic allegory, semiotics and pop music. Referencing cultural archetypes such as the femme fatale, La Natural invokes the historical "waves" feminism as a means of contextualizing contemporary issues including climate change, domestic isolation (aka "lock down") and existential precarity.

As a social and philosophical movement, feminism acts as a cultural bridge between France and the United States. The genesis of feminism can be traced back to the French revolution (1848), a full century before reverberating across the modern Zeitgeist (and the Atlantic Ocean) through the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, who published her seminal work The Second Sex in 1949. Her enthusiastic reception by American magazine editors and the liberal intelligentsia accelerated the momentum of feminism throughout the twentieth century, culminating in a kind of torch-passing to American feminist theorists and writers, many of whom were (and are still) based in California, including in and around the Bay area.

Authors such as Donna Haraway, Octavia Butler and Kimberlé Crenshaw laid the groundwork for a new wave of intersectional feminism in the 1980s and 1990s, one that embraced technology and refuted the gender binary. Today, we find ourselves in the latest wave, a highly networked and digitally active manifestation of feminism that nonetheless continues to resonate with many of Simone de Beauvoir's original existential arguments. 

La Natural, co-presented with Re.riddle gallery, will take place October 17th - 19th, nightly from 7-9pm. Films will be screened on the windows of the Villa SF, a suitably domestic canvas to track feminism's evolution, its archetypes and manifold permutations, as well as the connections between feminism's central premise and the existential threats currently plaguing humanity on a planetary scale.