Photography by: Md Akram Hossain, Mohammad Safkat Khan, Yuzuru Maeda, and Mohosin Kabir
Presented by Marisa Garreffa at the 18th Asian Art Biennale, Bangladesh, 2018
Rituals of Healing: Traces, a three hour performance of memory, storytelling, installation, and ritual.
In 2013, Garreffa was drugged and raped in Florence. She was photographed by the rapist, who painted her eyelids with orange paint and posed her body on blue bed sheets, using a red high-heeled shoe as a prop. Those images were the replacement for her memory, which she has never recovered due to the drugs used. The body remembers. The unconscious remembers. Through these rituals Marisa seeks to create memory where there is none, and to release residual trauma from the cells and energy field of her body.
“Trauma leaves memory shattered, the key to an understanding of non-linear time, a history without a storyline, instead only fragments, fractures, flickers – traces. I take the traces of a night I am unable to remember, of periods of my life that I am unable to remember, and I work them using ritual, using the power of beauty, and layer by layer I allow them to take me deeper into myself, into the earth, into the ancestors, into what lays beyond it all, and so the lead transforms to gold, so the philosopher finds their stone, so the elements speak to and heal all that is destroyed, teaching of the many life cycles within a single life, and the rise and fall of everything that can be known, until we arrive, finally, at the gates of the mystery, which are always open for those ready to leave all behind.”
In the second chapter, Garreffa emerges from beneath a white paper sculpture, spread like a land map over the floor, a creation hand sewn by the artist from drafts of a book she wrote to relieve the trauma, endless versions of a lost story. She works with ashes and orange paint, (the colour used by her rapist to paint her face), creating a landscape over the body of wounds and injuries sustained through the violence in her past.
“Of three chapters or phases within the work, it is this phase of memory, grief, and often pure horror, that I wrap gently within the other chapters to temper a journey of remembering within transformation.
There is a need inside my body to express the pain, not to relive the exact events, but to live, finally, the truth of the fear, and all the other feelings that were swallowed back by shock, by survival. To finally allow them their moment to be heard, not as words, but as a lived experience through my body. In performance, they go further, they are also witnessed. I am witnessed. It is witnessed. I am no longer cursed by silence, no longer forced to hide. Somehow in this journey of memory my body has a chance to understand something that was far beyond reach when the traumas came – that there would be an after, that survival would give way to living, living would give way to healing, and healing would give way to the return of beauty, to life. I map these stages over and over again, each time guiding a deeper level of my cellular memory through this process of life, death, and rebirth, taking trapped histories of stone from inside me and transmuting them into water, teaching them how to return to flow, to soften, to soften stone, to change its heartbeat, its rhythm, and the very bones of my body and the earth through this action. As each stone shifts, those hidden behind it emerge, and the circle is cast again for the next ritual.”
In the third and final chapter, the funeral rites are held for she who was lost through trauma. Garreffa dresses herself in a black garment, preparing to care for the destroyed body on the floor, a body of her lost self. The torn dress is buried within a pool of salt, the tombstone a red high-heel shoe. She raises the paper sculpture up onto a hook, transforming it from a land mass into a river pouring from the sky. Time flowing as water through the present. She sits and sews fallen images and texts into the sculpture, a vigil of weaving together fragmented memories, performed for she who was lost. The tapestry has no clear final end or form.