Rupture

Rupture, is a video-installation about the double temporality of a wandering woman experience. It was developed within an art residency in Fontainebleau and Paris, where I have trekked for hours alone in the Fontainebleau Forest, and in the streets of Paris at night, where the suspension of time got in my way in the form of apnea, that is, an experience of an interrupted time deeply rooted in a state of survival. In the middle of the forest, with no map, I found myself so many times in an alert state, and often holding my breath. I was loaded with my media gear while wandering around in the (almost invisible) trails of forest, where for hours I didn’t see a soul, sometimes my footsteps seemed to duplicate and echo to only a few meters from me. When I stopped to ensure that was no more than an illusion, a quietly overpowering at-mosphere was installed at the same time that the forest gave signs of its wilderness and its own breath through the sound of twigs breaking, chipping logs, leaves flying around, and yet there was not a single breeze. After a few minutes I could hear another «sound track» as a backdrop: the sound of the birds and other animals. The breath of the forest was continuous; and mine was punctuated by some apnoea mo-ments of awareness. I walked back and forward several times through the same trail, thinking should I go back, should I go forward, not being sure if that was the right trail. Throughout this experience, the relation between holding one’s breath and the creative process took on peculiar contours. That is, I found myself in a suspend time where the notion of apnea was felt and under-stood from a dual approach: sometimes it was felt as a breathing space that encouraged going forth, some-times it was holding me back. During those trekking hours, beside recording what lies ahead and my re-luctant and self-conscious detour through the forest, I also felt the need to point my camera towards what was behind me, like a second eye in the back of my head. Only when, back in the studio, I saw those im-ages and put them side by side, I saw the conflict between them. It was in this back and forth of the crea-tive process that the double temporality of an everyday experience took place emerging as spasm, a cut, a rupture. I recall the words of Agnès Varda, when she says that the first feminine gesture is to look out-wards, the act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by the way people see women, but also by the way women see the world. And Rupture represents one of many ways women find them-selves in the public space, looking forward and backwards.