Intricate and seamless, a work that like an umbilical cord, stretches, twists, to tell how life is magical and how violence has always accompanied it.
The work BIRTH is inspired by the ancient Russian tale of Vassilissa, analyzed by the anthropologist and Jungian psychoanalyst, the Native American (or mestiza) Clarissa Pinkola Estés who explains to us how this text is a story of female initiation.She explains how the female figure has been seen in the stories of the oral tradition in the famous text “women who run with the wolves” through the popular stories of the oral tradition. She talks about how the woman must listen to the “loba”, the wolf, the wild woman that is inside her to reconnect with the earth and the ancestral rhythms of the life cycle. The story tells of the young Vassilissa and takes on a magical aspect, sometimes obscured by time, starting from the traumatic event of the death of her mother who gives her a doll as a gift. The girl must look for the enigmatic figure of Baba Yaga in the woods, a dark place where she will meet three knights who represent the three ages of the woman. Vassilissa asks questions to Baba Yaga who enlightens her on the infinite cycle of Life/Death/Life, a special vision of the female world.
Pinkola Estés in her anthropological studies often encounters the theme of red in the myths and fairy tales of the various cultures that she analyzes and recalls how this color is always linked to the theme of the feminine, of birth, of the blood of the uterus, of eroticism. It is an archetypal color, and she also associates it with a birth theme as a woman, not only as a physical event but also a psychic one.
BIRTH is characterized by a monochromatism that takes on a profound meaning: red, the color of blood, of vital emotion, of pulsating viscera, therefore, precisely to signify this theme, the birth of life, the transformation of the woman.
Therefore an umbilical cord but also our deepest and most unconscious self that finds a home in the viscera.
Vassilissa seeks answers to reach the truth of the essence of life and draws lessons from Baba Yaga, understanding that we must let live and let die in a continuous vital cycle, the important, fundamental rhythm that everyone should understand. In this work I tell of this female initiation, and it is also a reflection of how I lived and live as a daughter and mother, there is my birth as a woman and an artist. So this magic word, to be born, has a multiple meaning.
