Magic Mirror
I needed twenty three years to confront and verbalize, through an art project, the experience that severed my childhood. The topic? Barely touched upon by others. Child abuse. Time proved helpful to take up risks, mature and most importantly, go back in time, sometimes reluctantly, to that place where the vivid memory still reaches out to my present in the form of panic attacks, anxiety issues and other uncomfortable consequences. Thus, my interest in the development of a series of images which could bring together a child-like vision (my own as I can recall) and an adult perspective, (that which now seeks to expiate the love I felt for the transgressor) stems from an inescapable urge to channel out those (un)conscious pulsations living somewhere in the back of my head.
I then seek to revisit those stories from my childhood - fairy tales- that shaped my own identity as I grew up. I reconstructed my own past through the creation of situations, half real half fiction, that can re-signify what they all were, what they can be now. It deals with issues of violence, child abuse and rites of passage, all concepts that authors such as Bruno Bettelheim, consider as crucial elements in the semiotics of traditional fairy tales. Their admonitory and moral tones allow me to penetrate to their very core from my own current perspective. I also want to bring attention to the act of looking; in the images, others look on. I want to project ourselves as involuntary witnesses or observers of an experience that we evade for it is a rather unpleasant affair.
