Art
Project:
Material:
Paper, Blood, Indian ink.
This artwork
is part of the project, "Placenta-Rorschach. Notes on a placenta: the
roots of the fetus in the mother's soil."
In this
project, the blood-red color present in each work is also the one that brings
together all newborns, putting them on the same level, regardless of gender,
personal and social conditions, religion, political views, skin color.
The
placenta and the blood red color make no distinction.
That image
of the newborn coming out of the amniotic sac is me more than thirty years ago,
and my mother more than sixty, and my grandmother more than ninety. That fetus
is African, Chinese, Armenian, Latvian, one who will win the Nobel Prize in Physics,
one who will fail the first exam, one who will change the fate of Jazz, one who
will be a waiter for life, one who will die in the mines, one who will yearn
for genocide, one who will become the mustached woman of a nomadic circus.
The
placenta represents the roots of the fetus in the mother's soil.
An amazing
land that hosts you for nine months. Cutting the umbilical cord is like cutting
the memory of those moments as well.
A memory
that perhaps remains imprinted in the placenta. Perhaps it holds all those
fantastic memories that accompanied you from being a cell to being a Fetus, to
being a Newborn. The first beat, the first dream. The ring that records the
first battles and armistices with your mother. The memory of our first
performance in which we gave our best for life. The memory of a score that
played the dawn of our imaginary world. The memory of our first script, which
we write to learn how to be born.
I like
working with the placenta: i can play with it, and joke with the mother who has
just given birth, with the grandmother and with the newborn at the same time. I
can put my hand under the amniotic sac and simulate playful movements of the
fetus, and laugh with the birth.
Technique:
Indian ink
on paper, on blood stain of human placenta.
I lay the
still bloody placenta on a card so that it leaves a blood stain on the paper. I
look at that stain as if it were a Rorschach stain. An "abstract"
stain, suggesting and evoking figurative images. I draw these images with
Indian ink, quickly and without thinking.
Curiosity:
For the
realization of this project i met many expectant mothers who
"donated" their placentas to me, midwives, conventional and
unconventional, including Midwife Carmela (my mother), Midwife Luciana (second
mother and midwife who delivered me), Midwife Elena who inspired me to do this
project during a dinner. In Palermo, I spent a day dissecting placentas and
studying them under the microscope in Pathological Anatomy at Cervello Hospital
invited by a Placentologist Research Doctor.
Future
Actions:
Installations/sculptures
with and of human placentas.
