[The Guardian] The big picture: a pioneering Indian skater girl shows off her prized board

The big picture: a pioneering Indian skater girl shows off her prized board

Photographer Chantal Pinzi travelled the globe to take shots of female skateboarders who defy cultural norms, including this one of Asha Gond

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.

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