Rites of Passage, 2024

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Performance and Video Diptych

 

I am interested in the tension between domestic and wildness- how these spaces coexist in tenuous relationship both in the environment but also in the inner landscape of the mind and body. 

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 “Rites of Passage” is a video diptych filmed one week before I gave birth and again one year postpartum. The term “rites of passage” references a ceremony or ritual marking a significant, often biological, event; such as maturation and death, or in this case the transformative experience of childbirth and motherhood. Initially created to honor this life-altering shift, I was inspired by Slavic birth traditions and superstitions, such as placing one’s body on the earth during labor for strength, adornments in red, and braiding the mother’s hair for protection. This gesture also became an attempt to process the uncertainty of my new identity and explores the unexpected and conflicting feelings of new motherhood, made more complicated by postpartum rage and depression. The dualities presented are meant to be considered not as separate realities, but held simultaneously as one truth, an entangled embodiment of beauty, pain, tenderness, loneliness, love and loss.

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This is a personal story, but it also reflects a collective lack of community and support for new mothers, and a deep need for conversation around maternal mental health. These individual experiences mirror universal events, as both the earth and human bodies, especially maternal bodies, are environments in and on which many living organisms live and depend.