In this work, I place my body in an outdoor space within the company of other, chosen bodies that my own feels safe to be with. We gather in the place where we first met, in a secret garden we had not discovered before. The ritual is spontaneous. The intention: to invite grace, to invite healing, to tell the wounded and violated body that it is cared for. We gather together elements from nature and create a wooden floor. Together we install our gatherings into the place. Alone, but guarded by two trusted bodies, I enter the space and begin to create a sacred water, filled with elements and fragments of the natural world. Can nature teach me what it means to heal as a fractured body?
When the water is ready, I am carefully washed by my two, trusted companions. A bed of leaves is created, I place my body upon it, and the hands begin their work of painting my body in blue. The colour of grace, of water, of distance, of the sky and ocean of Australia left behind me, of memory, of present, of space and lost light. From berries taken from a tree, my heart is made red. It is a sign of hope, of invocation, of prayer that a wounded heart can become whole.
After the ritual, we gather together. We are many, anam cara, and we embrace and the paint is shared from body to body. We embrace. We lay beneath the sun.
The documentation is spontaneous, taken only with telephones. The images are fragments of a memory that was never intended to live as a photographic series in this incarnation of the work. The outcomes I seek are within the body itself. What may be changed by this process? It is an act of listening to the body, to multiple bodies, to allow them to speak, to speak to them will love, to paint a different kind of experience over the ones that came before.
My body was photographed, naked and exposed, by the man who raped it. In these works, I seek to understand how my body can exist among others, how I can exist within this wounded body itself, how ongoing reflection upon my body on camera may evolve, and with it, my sense of identity ever in flux, evolution, revolution, spanning from rage to grace.
Performers: Marisa Garreffa, Daiane Rafeala, Giorgia de Santi
With the support and collaboration of: Sabrina Bellenzier, Cristiana Zeta Rolla, Emalia Mattia
And special thanks to Fenia Kotsopoulou for the gift of this blue