Before her death, 99-year-old Catarina Orduña Pérez had one last wish: a giant statue of a penis on her grave.
Her family unveiled the finished monument - a 167cm long penis and testicles weighing nearly 270kg - placed on her grave in a cemetery in Mexico last weekend as a "recognition of her love and joy for life."
"She wanted to break the paradigm of everything Mexican, where things are sometimes hidden because of a lack of open-mindedness," her grandson Álvaro Mota Limón told VICE World News in an interview. "She was always very avant-garde, very advanced."
Here's the moment that Doña Cata's 600 pound cock and balls statue was unveiled on her wife. #BVE pic.twitter.com/glP1ZK1QYY
— Nathaniel Janowitz (@ngjanowitz) July 28, 2022
Mota Limón recalled how his grandmother "saw life with great optimism and that problems should not overwhelm us". She conceived that idea of ??family with the metaphor of a penis, which means when you're a virgin “you don't have to give up. When problems arose, you had to face them head on."
Verga is a word that has many meanings in Mexico – it can be used as an insult, but in some cases also as a symbol of honor or appreciation when something is very good.
"At first I thought it was a joke," said Isidro Lavoignet, the engineer who made the penis. "Because it's not very common to see these kinds of sculptures or monuments, much less in memory of someone who has died."
But while Lavoignet said the project was "the strangest he's ever built," he wasn't really surprised when he met Doña Cata, because she was someone who "broke taboos."
