Franja Morada (Purple Stripe), 2022

Performance

In Purple Stripe, Leticia Izrego intervenes a public space marked by national symbolism. With her naked body entirely painted purple, she approaches the Spanish flag at one of the entrances to Villaviciosa de Odón (Madrid), inserting her body into the visual logic of the nation-state.

By adding the purple of her skin to the red and yellow of the flag, the artist evokes the tricolor of the Second Spanish Republic. The gesture operates as a living amendment to official memory: a temporary, embodied “third stripe” that recalls the unfinished feminist struggles of the 1930s and the historical rupture produced by Francoism.

Performed at dawn, the action triggered police intervention, raising questions about public nudity, freedom of expression, and the limits of dissent in democratic space. Rather than provocation for its own sake, the work situates the body as political archive — a surface where history, gender, and state power collide.

Purple Stripe reclaims the body not as spectacle, but as a critical tool to expose how memory is constructed, regulated, and contested in the public sphere.