The Circle of my Flesh

The Circle of My Flesh emerges from a thirty-year process during which I lived in a body-for-others and from where I gave birth to a series of writings in the form of a diary.

Shortly before my tenth birthday, I was surprised by my first menstruation. I turned to my mother who, with sudden delight --which I found inexplicable-- took me to our home library to show me the anatomical female body contained in a volume of the Medical Encyclopedia. She told me that I had become a woman and warned me of the risk I ran of getting pregnant; before I could ask a single question, my mother closed the book.

The Circle of My Flesh emerges from a thirty-year process during which I lived in a body-for-others and from where I gave birth to a series of writings in the form of a diary. From this intimate world, I deconstructed the binary, linear legacy to create a circular one. Subconsciously, these writings function like the womb where the images making up the body of this work are conceived. Through them I address the journey of a corporality seeking its individuality, no longer as a motherwife but rather as an agent demanding time and space for itself, and questioning the unrealistic ideal of the exclusive-loving-sacrificing-mother. Through this path and in this time, I shaped, destroyed and rebuilt myself numerous times in an attempt to become a self-for-itself.

My mother’s grand design was completed ten years later when I became pregnant. It wasn’t until after two decades that I conquered a room of my own, to grow, create and reinvent myself. In The Circle of My Flesh all the moments and all the emotions, in my attempts to protect the beings that I engendered with my body, blend together. It is the same body that limits me, like retaining walls, through which I am also liberated: With it, I not only opened all the books I needed to read, but also rewrite them, from the circle of my flesh.