Essentially a Woman is an audiovisual project that the author develops through digital video, merging performance, stop-motion animation, and artistic work whose segments consistently appear, complemented by a series of digital photographs. The video is a short artistic film that, in terms of narrative structure, intertwines psychodramatic elements, guiding the author on a path of catharsis. Using techniques of image composition from traditional painting, she creates an atmosphere of loneliness of the female figure in a sterile space. Through a restrained color palette, she hints at three parallel currents: the blue color represents the protagonist’s lethargy, or the author’s own, while the orange symbolizes the burning surge of inspiration in the corridors of the hell of self-awareness, and the red alludes to victory. She deconstructs her own being using building blocks of inspiration. The triggers carry symbolic messages that summon a personal trait. By isolating them, we come to understand the motives of the pursuit of one’s own essence.
Bound by the need for creativity, she transforms into an artistic work at the final stage of a questioning journey. Emerging from the hell of self-awareness, she incorporates symbols of what the artist has sacrificed: time represented by an hourglass, love symbolized by a human heart from which fingers emerge, touching her own essence, teeth that bite to fulfill the creative need, the combativeness of red boxing gloves that break the chains of conventions expressed by handcuffs, constrained by her own imagination, ready to expand. The actors of the integral mechanism, only in mutual connection, bring the protagonist to the end of the path.
The photographs illustrate the overwhelming psychological processes during a state of stillness. The well-known symbols now clearly present the emotional side of the earlier journey. They are accompanied by short poetic texts, guiding the viewer toward the broken pieces of the wall that concealed the artist’s essence. Behind it was hiding the Woman —- privileged before the obscurities. Adored and adored, she peers out with her image, showing her essence.
The opening photograph depicts the protagonist wrapped in red fabric, lying on the floor. The overhead angle intensifies the feeling of subjugation to the environment, and the position of the body evokes Rubens’ Prometheus chained to the rock of Caucasus, the furthest part of the Greek world, where man’s loneliness flows through the air, much like that which surrounds the artist in the process of creation. The fabric rises over her face, covering her eyes. Their absence is replaced by the eyeball at the lower part of the photograph, giving us a sense of the protagonist’s presence. Even when enveloped in darkness, nothing escapes her notice.
The next photograph shows the protagonist, her back turned, nailed to a chair. In the foreground, a clash between red gloves and handcuffs takes place, invoking the traits of titans: courage, pride, defiance, humanism, and the pursuit of freedom. In the third photograph, we witness the weight with which her feet are pressed against the floor. Like Prometheus, she is chained by earthly shackles, social conventions, and the question of her past and future existence, left to have her gut gnawed at again and again each day.
In the fourth stage, the liberated young goddess rises above the world to reclaim what belongs to her. Her feet gently walk into the unknown along a red path of success. In a suitcase, she keeps emptiness, which she will slowly leave behind her.
The series is rounded off with a photograph of the protagonist wrapped in luxurious white lace. Beneath her legs lies a heart from which red fabric spreads, symbolizing the cycle and rebirth. The motif of the photograph evokes the primordial deity —- Phoebus’s Gaia, the mother of all that is beautiful in the world. She was born from the chaos of deep emptiness. After her came hell and love, and together they are the children of the dark primordial void from which everything else emerges. It is from such emptiness that the artistic work is born: spontaneously, either from nothing or from chaos.
