When I saw the photographs the rapist had made of my drugged body, a flash of red caught my eye. A red, high-heeled shoe was hanging from my mouth, its heel inside and the toe dragging its weight down my chin. It was not my shoe. In the same year, just a few short months later, women across Italy filled the piazzas with red painted shoes to symbolise all of the women lost to femicide. It was a startling image for me, this symbol, that in my case was a very literal object of violence. I, however, survived. Years later, I would finally see another photograph of this shoe taken by detectives when building the evidence for my case. I look at it sometimes. I rarely wear heels anymore, and hesitate at the colour red. That too will pass, in its own time. For now, I listen to this symbol of fallen women. We grieve together. Remember together. Rage together. Rest together. I try to help the shoes to fly.

The Traces Project

The Traces Project is a collaboration between performance artist Marisa Garreffa and photographer Sarah Hickson. Born out of Marisa’s Rituals of Healing series, in which she explores her own history as a survivor of violence through live ritual, Sarah and Marisa undertook a residency during 2018 at Au Brana Cultural Centre, France, to explore a very specific element of trauma. Its traces. During a drug rape in 2013, Marisa was photographed extensively by the rapist, and she saw these images in the aftermath. The choice to work only with Sarah as a photographer, without any audience or public for the rituals themselves, was to create a series of images and explore the recapturing of Marisa’s body on film in her own way. There was no intention to recreate the rape itself, or the rape images, but instead to create new images using what traces were left and what traces could be found that spoke directly to memory – fragments, elements, emotions, and echoes. These traces are then worked, and re-worked, in future rituals, future performances, future installations, becoming echoes of echoes of echoes, each trace leading farther from the original source of pain, through the passage of grief, and towards the integration of beauty. Marisa and Sarah spent five days exploring the woods, seeking out signs of the wounds in nature, and gathering materials for the rituals. Marisa installed the materials into the space, creating a large symbolic universe, and then the pair spent four days in continuous ritual together. In silence, in movement, in reflection, as the nights turned dark and the sun first rose. Their bodies moved as one, and the lines between performer and photographer became insignificant. These images were the first outcome of that process. In the next phase of the work, they will explore methods for working these Traces together, in a new series of performance exhibits open to the public, also incorporating the Traces and bodies of other artists.