Mangia il Dolore is a piece created over the course of two years in prayer for the Italian matriarchs of my family and for myself. It locates ancestry in the body, as well as in the spirit, and speaks to the manifestations of ancestral stories through materiality. Intergenerational pain takes form in the flesh, sometimes as physical pain, sometimes as sickness. Mangia il Dolore was/is the process of transforming pain– the emotional elements who become somatic, who flare in times of stress, who keep me in bed accompanied by the timelessness of brain fog. Within timelessness lies the potential for connection to what is beyond the body. Dissociation can be a space of liberation and immense emptiness. Mangia il Dolore ties the ancestral body and the physical body together, recognizing that our own healing stretches beyond self, rippling into the past, into mother, mother’s mother, into the beyond.

 

Using a diversity of mediums, I communicate stories of living in-between– neither here nor there. I theorize that liminality is a bridge between worlds, an alive space that art can uniquely language. I structure my acts of storytelling through mediums best suited to communicate ethically and honestly, simultaneously upholding the necessity of beauty. The technologies I use in creation are an exploration of the body/spirit as a site of transmission, and predominantly include textiles, painting, mixed media and video.

 

I draw inspiration for my work from the stories of my lineage (Sámi, Italian, Scottish, Russian), the stories of my community and from repeating patterns within historical and contemporary society. The core of my research and creative exploration lies in undoing dichotomy and instead searching for truth through nuance and paradox. This is a process that can only be engaged through reflection and listening. Rooted in a foundation of queer theory, body politics, and ethnoecology as methods of investigating the meaning of being in a body, my belief is that embodiments of non-linearity and multidimensionality are essential for dissolving the illusory binaries constructed by societal conditioning. In my interdisciplinary practice I continuously ask, how is the relationship between multidimensionality and the body both a site of beauty and struggle?

 

Building multiple points of relation for my audience, I communicate from the threshold between liminality and the body in space. I aim to create works that elicit feelings of both disorientation and hope, as related to experiences of multidimensionality. It is my aspiration that the works I create will either lead to greater dialogue in our communities or contribute to dialogue that is already in motion.