RUPLICA 

25/10/2024

Ruplica Exit/Endings Unfinished Fridays . 

 

‘My mom calls me: "You're going to shave your armpits for the wedding, aren't you?”

My cousin, aka my childhood bestie, is getting married in a few weeks. In the lineup of cousins, I am next, introducing my boyfriend. 

Everybody in the family wonders: “Who knows what's keeping her abroad, for sure there is a guy.” 

Actually, what keeps me far away is the freedom of not having a guy and the freedom to even think of myself as a guy.

I’m away from my mother's gaze. 

Or rather, that's what I tend to think.

In reality, a look, once it touches skin, can leave undoable marks. 

A gaze scalds, stings, burns, that burning that makes you feel icy cold. 

Her eyes can reach my body in the most intimate moments, freezing the warm thing I was about to make a move.

I’m stuck again 

Imagined eyes, reminiscences of a little girl whose matters of course are becoming sins. 

Visions of being the vision. 

The source of this division.’ - Luisa Pisetta Ravanell

 On the 25th of October, we performed our collaboration Replica: Between two shadows, during the Unfinished Friday. To the sound of a ticking clock, I read Luisa’s text which details her story back home in Italy. Luisa lies on her back, an apple resting on her stomach moving up and down with each breath, while the rest of the apples are around her on the floor. Ravanelli stands and begins to collect the apples into her white dress in a motherly protective attitude. She then shoots them into the gallery space, before running around and collecting them back into her dress that looks like a pregnancy dress once the apples are fully collected each time. This simple repetitive action, with the fruit slamming into the walls and rolling through the audience until they begin to crumble and dissolve. As the floor becomes covered with the crumbs and Ravanelli’s dress gets stained with the red colour, the performance portrays our wounds, pain and scars of patriarchal structures rooted deep within our upbringing, burdens carried, marks left, and our final resistance.

Lake Studio, Berlin, Germany