Hoselupf
Sabina Bösch
“Hoselupf” is a vernacular word meaning “to lift up by the pants.” Sabina Bösch’s project examines the women’s division of Schwingen, or Swiss wrestling, the most traditional sport in Switzerland. This sport, which women did not win the right to participate in at a professional level until 1982, remains essentially masculine. Armed with her camera, Bösch accompanied women and girls during a season of five tournaments in the summer of 2019 that took place at various locations across Switzerland. The series of colour and black-and-white images assembles shots in which the gender of the wrestlers is not always easily discernible.
Sometimes presented in diptychs to create a dialogue between two images or two bodies, simultaneously sensual and brutal, her photographs give a contemporary female perspective on a combat sport, and bring their protagonists out of the shadows to which even today they are still often relegated.
Year of production: 2021
