For the past few years the Italian photographer Chantal Pinzi has been documenting the rebel spirit of female skateboarders, in a project she calls Shred the Patriarchy. Her original focus was on girls who skated in Morocco, in defiance of cultural norms. She continued that project in rural India, where a handful of women have used skateboarding to stake out public spaces for themselves.
One pioneer of this is Asha Gond, who grew up in a farming family in the village of Janwaar in Madhya Pradesh. In 2014 a charitable organisation, the Rural Changemakers, helped to fund a skatepark in the village, built with the help of the community as a way of driving social and cultural development. Gond, one inspiration for the Netflix series Skater Girl, learned her skills at the park and became India’s only female competitor at the world skateboarding championship. The park had two rules: “No school, no skateboarding”, and “Girls first” – both rare sentiments in an area where girls often faced arranged marriages by the time they were of secondary school age.
This picture of Gond’s hands, with their traditional henna tattoos, clutching a skateboard, captures some of that story. Pinzi’s project, for which she travelled more than 3,000 miles in India to find skating communities in cities and villages, is a finalist in the sport category in this year’s Sony World Photography awards. Gond refused to follow the life that was mapped out for her by her family, and skating was a big part of her escape. She has recalled how her father would tell her to stop skateboarding, when villagers gossiped about her or made threats. “I was thinking: ‘Why can’t I do what I want?’ Boys do anything they want. Every day I was crying, but after crying I would feel stronger and new thoughts would come.”
