In order to live a fully human life we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence. - Adrienne Rich
I am a middle-aged menopausal – gender, culture and class fluid – white woman striving to break free from hegemonic-hierarchical binary models that live inside and outside myself.
Young at heart, I work on keeping off those fatty patriarchal toxins that clog hearts and stiffen bodies. I am a survivor, everyday fighting some old, white male concept, but I do wish to thrive, live up to my full female human potential.
As I seek out the prospect for cleaner, healthier, and fairer environments (1), the desire to find my inner space, grows.
As I seek out new references and models of how to exist, the desire for creativity, grows.
As I seek freedom, the desire to voice out the unresolved imaginary inside me, grows.
It becomes unmistakably obvious that only by freeing all that has been oppressed for so long, letting out all that has been censored, can open up western society towards a more qualitative humanity.
As I am purging from patriarchy’s dominant language, I am exploring my inner space, that is, the space of my creativity, a space of freedom. By becoming the narrator of my own story and not an object acted upon but a subject acting from its inner space, I aim at liberating from all false certainties colonizing my imagination. By focusing on my inner human development, I aim at regaining a new kind of hope. A hope for different narratives advancing new possibilities, resolved from violence and rules of power and control.
As a middle-aged perimenopausal woman artist, I want to be part of that conversation, where women, together with other “minorities,” offer these new “ways of seeing” with their colourful knowledge and wisdoms.
Stemming out of the most ancient, deepest and only root I really have: Mother Nature, my work investigates the intersectionality of social and environmental injustices in relation to the natural realm that I feel no longer wholesome.
Fed up with having to fulfill expectations, I try to find my voice out of cultural theories, information, data, concepts and anxieties by rooting in my body’s physical sensations that might have a spiritual core connected to nature. At times a rant on capitalism woven into personal experiences, I question my role so far, of a white, woman, artist as a way to trigger a homeopathic healing process.
A series of small-intimate gestures, set in rural and urban, domestic and public contexts, have been growing out of me as acts of disruptive rebellion that explore my eco feminist awareness while reeducating myself away from patriarchal inculcations.
While Fine—white-male-centered—Art had taught me egocentrism, I now find myself constantly dwelling with the meaning of inclusivity, diversity, collectivity, equity, community, and participation.
Less ego driven, humbler, more intimate, and introspective, my renewed practice aims at questioning the significance of success and of my ambitions, as well as the political, social, spiritual, and environmental functions and responsibilities of art making.
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Repossessing my body (2)
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Practicing my NOs (plural):
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Not having a car (but cycling, walking, using public transport instead).
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Not having a mobile phone (but reaching out to people on the streets for help, information, directions and human contact instead).
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Not reading most literature written by white male authors (privileging women’s literature instead).
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Not being on social media (but still part of the conversation).
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Rarely using pharmaceutical products (but natural remedies instead).
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Choosing how to source my income and limit my contribution to the processes of production and consumption (work less, earn less, consume less, waste less, need less, pollute less: live more).
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Making the kitchen the evolutionary center of thought and action, the laboratory from which ideas and culture are forged and passed onto other bodies.
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Creating time for caring (connecting with myself, with nature and with people) (3).
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Reverting those systematic/systemic behaviours by slowing down my processes to reestablish ancient and more profound values.
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Acknowledging the purpose of not extraordinary but ordinary chores as a sustainable-DIY-activism that defines me.
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Realizing we have power in all kinds of ways that we don’t think we have.
These are forms of everyday poetic resistance/acceptance that use the body as my main medium. Imaginatively provoking the chance of sensations, they trust intuition and collaborate with the knowledge embedded in the tissue of our bodies.
Inspired by my grandmother and my mum — whose stories and mannerisms live inside me — these doings find in the household a place of political resistance that affirms the value of “housekeeping” knowledge and the importance of under recognized tasks of domestic and necessity labour. Grounded in the moment of the now, tangible actions of care and maintenance become forms of daily sustainable creativity, or, of creative sustainability.
Not mechanical actions, but meaningful work, these gestures are filled with mindful awareness that offer care and nourishment as the answer for personal and public wellbeing while reminding that keeping and caring are vital forms, not just of economic production, but more importantly they are agencies of liveliness and culture-making, impacting the environment and all its spiritual, social, political spheres.
“Operations” (4) of love, cleaning and arranging are in fact part of my daily spiritual practice that connects me to my surroundings whether the environment, people or myself. They hold a space/opportunity for creativity that I find necessary to fulfil.
Produced in the art studio of my body, these impermanent small movements have a performative nature that sometimes get to be documented on video. As gestures need to be translated to become symbols and symbols need translating to be felt interiorly, these transactions are inevitably subjected to yet another layer of transformation. From emotion to symbol and from symbol to emotion, they are subjected to the infinite chainreaction of cosmic processes that magically shift my conscious and unconscious being continuously.
I love transforming, but what I really seek is the transmission of the visceral.
I am a conceptually trained artist fed up with conceptual art!
Inspired by nature, like a plant, I channel my roots deeper into the earth. Closer to water, I reconnect to my source. Facing the sun, I craft my new self away from CO2 towards fresh oxygen.
I, We, shall heal, from the inside out!
claudi Piripippi 