Los Angeles, Winter 2015
In order to live a fully human life we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence. - Adrienne Rich
I am middle-aged perimenopausal, a gender, culture and class fluid woman striving to break free from hegemonic-hierarchical binary models that live inside and outside myself.
Young at heart, I work on keeping off those fatty patriarchal toxins that clog hearts and stiffen bodies. I am an everyday fighter, surviver of some old white male concept, yearning to thrive, finally live up to my full female potential.
As I seek the prospect for cleaner, healthier, and fairer environments,
desire to find my inner space, grows.
As I seek new references, models of how to exist,
desire for creativity, grows.
As I seek freedom,
desire to voice out the unresolved imaginary inside me, grows.
As I seek an authentic self,
desire to unleash my wildest grows.
It becomes unmistakably obvious that only by freeing all that has been oppressed for so long, letting out all that has been censored, can open western society up towards a more qualitative humanity.
The purging from patriarchy’s dominant language, allows for the exploration of creativity. By becoming the narrator of my own story and not an object acted upon but a subject acting from its inner space, I aim at liberating from all false certainties colonizing my imagination. By focusing on my inner human development, I aim at regaining trust and hope for new narratives resolved from violence and rules of power and control.
As a middle-aged perimenopausal woman artist, I want to be part of that conversation, where women, together with other “minorities,” offer these new “ways of seeing” with their colourful knowledge and wisdoms.
Stemming out of the most ancient, deepest and only root I really have: Mother Nature, my work investigates the intersectionality of social and environmental injustices in relation to the natural realm that I feel no longer wholesome.
Fed up of having to fulfil expectations, I try to find my voice out of cultural theories, information, data, concepts and anxieties by rooting in my body’s physical sensations: the spiritual core connected to nature.
At times a rant on capitalism interwoven with personal experiences, I question my role while seeking to trigger a homeopathic healing process.
A series of small-intimate gestures, set in rural and urban, domestic and public contexts, have been branching out of me as acts of poetic disruption that explore my eco feminist awareness while reeducating myself away from patriarchal inculcations.
While Fine (white-male-centered) Art has taught me egocentrism, I now find myself constantly dwelling with the meaning of inclusivity, diversity, collectivity, equity, community, and participation.
Less ego driven, humbler, more intimate, and introspective, my renewed practice aims at questioning the significance of success and of my ambitions, as well as the political, social, spiritual, and environmental functions and responsibilities of art making.
Repossessing my body
Not having a car but cycling, walking and bussing instead.
Not having a mobile phone but reaching out to people on the streets for help, asking for information, directions and human contact instead.
Not being on social media but still part of the conversation.
Privileging women’s literature.
Rarely using pharmaceutical products, using natural remedies instead.
Choosing how to source my income and limit my contribution to the processes of production and consumption (work less, earn less, consume less, waste less, need less, pollute less: live more).
Creating time for caring (connecting with myself, with nature and with people).
Reverting those systematic/systemic behaviours by slowing down my processes to reestablish ancient and more profound values.
Acknowledging the purpose of not extraordinary but ordinary chores as a sustainable DIY activism, realizing we have power in all kinds of ways that we don’t think we have.
These are my small forms of everyday resistance/acceptance that use the body as medium. Imaginatively provoking the chance of sensations, they trust intuition and collaborate with the knowledge embedded in the tissue of our bodies.
Inspired by my grandmother and my mum — whose stories and mannerisms live inside me — I find meaning in domestic labour, household being a place of political resistance that affirms the value of “housekeeping” as the underling pillar of social structure.
Grounded in the moment of the now, tangible actions of care and maintenance become forms of daily sustainable creativity, or, of creative sustainability. Not mechanical actions, these gestures are filled with mindful awareness that offer care and nourishment as the answer for personal and public wellbeing while reminding that keeping and caring are vital forms, not just of economic production, but more importantly they are agencies of liveliness and culture-making, impacting the environment in all its spiritual, social, political spheres.
“Operations of love”, cleaning and arranging are in fact part of my daily spiritual practice that connects me to my surroundings whether the environment, people or myself. They hold a space/opportunity for creativity that I find necessary to fulfil.
Produced in the art studio of my body, these impermanent small movements have a performative nature that sometimes get to be documented on video. As gestures need to be translated to become symbols and symbols need translating to be felt interiorly, these transactions are inevitably subjected to yet another layer of transformation. From emotion to symbol and from symbol to emotion, they magically thread into the infinite and continuous chain reaction of cosmic processes that shift everything. I love transforming, but what I really seek is the transmission of the visceral.
I am a conceptually trained artist inspired by nature. Like a plant, I channel my roots deeper into the earth. Closer to water, I reconnect to my source. Facing the sun, I craft my new self away from CO2 towards fresh oxygen.
I, We, shall heal, from the inside out!
Los Angeles, 2015
Notes:
(1) I seek for a “feminization” of the world that is no longer insensitive to injustice.
(2) The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers. The female body has been both territory and machine, virgin wilderness to be exploited and assembly-line turning out life….Every women needs to be the presiding genius of her body. In such world thinking itself will be transformed and new life will truly be created altering human existence in a new relationship to the world. (Adrienne Rich, from Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution)
(3) It is a responsibility towards ourselves as well as towards society, to live a healthy life looking after our wellbeing. Why delegate my overall wellbeing to some unknown entity (most likely a corporation or a patriarchal institution) giving away power and control over my own body? Making sure I am well by looking after physical, mental and spiritual health of my body and therefore of my immediate surroundings is a responsibility that affects not just my self, but my loved ones, my community and the environment. The consequences of individual lifestyles choices greatly impact the well being of the whole environment and the societies that live within it. We should stop taking over space invading it with our carbon dioxide; stop exhausting land and people with our decadent discharge and polluting waste! Instead, we ought to make and hold space for one another by preserving, respecting and worship clean air, clean water and clean soil for everybody to healthily live from.
(4) Moments/Movements of love. No candy, chocolate, soda, sugar nor any other factory produced artificial sweeteners will ever truly sweeten our lives, it is only through love that we can achieve true joy.
Latest updated statement (Summer 2022)
I want to start a new bio, a new life, a new approach to my work. One that uses my own shit, “capitalizing” on my mess rather than on others’.
For problem solving’s sake, some sort of conflict is needed — to make art. Since 2000, the environmental crisis has lent itself as topic to my practice. Was that the right approach to demonstrate my love for nature? I wonder — but I am growing into a wider, more spiritual understanding of the cosmos. So this time I want my own mess to be both the subject and the object of my work; study the landscape inside of me, the inner environment. I want to experiment with personal transformation: can it be a form of social engagement? Hence flipping things around a bit, although still in the vein of the personal is political, but also sacred. Nonetheless, environment and nature remain inherent, cardinal themes without which my art could not even exist.
Care — anything we do is to benefit selves, to conquer freedom and ultimately love — or is it the other way around? But my reality is conditioned, limited by all the social, cultural, moral, ethic and aesthetic judgments. Yes, I am — uncomfortably, fucking white — fifty/fifty German/Italian, both, unbearably nazi/fasci — no matter what or how, I have it in me, the fuckedupness. It didn’t start with you, says Mark Wolynn, so here I am, battling, against the “trauma of white supremacy”, in Resmaa Menakem words, struggling with the toxic “Myth of Normal” (Gabor Maté).
I want my work to be in collaboration with my wound and with the galaxy of events that contributes to the cosmic pain. It’s a collaboration with my consciousness: a collective of voices and mysterious energies that guide my practice. Art, is my safe space where I can be vulnerable, authentic and grow out of my confinement to become whole, that’s what drives my practice, to create a space for the soul — with all the elements that make the earth and the sky and the sea and me and us and more — to love.
Imperia, 2022