Our society tends to understand women as something that have to be beautiful and young. In Lydia Cecilia’s ‘Female horde’ series, the flowers and fashion elements are a metaphor which aims to create in the viewer a cognitive estrangement. 

Cognitive estrangement is a term coined by Darko Suvin (1979) to describe science fiction. Suvin calls science fiction a literature of “cognitive estrangement” in the context of significant effect of separating or “estranging” us from our usual assumptions about reality.

As Suvin’s ideas about science fiction, Lydia Cecilia feels that visual art in general, and collage in particular, have the potencial of showing us how accepted ideas in our society are constructions which could be different. And allow us to create a space for revolution of our ideas about the world. 

In ‘Female horde’ series, familiar objects and ideas, as flowers and fashion, are used to inspire new ideas of women as a powerful, complex and resilient creatures in her own nature. They are used to emphasize female power and how all these elements are tools for empowerment, in opposition to the general understanding of them as female weakness.