When I was a child, my grandfather would take me to the local pool every Sunday. I had faith in my body's ability to keep me afloat in the water, to learn new strokes, to flip, and twist, and play. I felt at home in my body then.
Time has a grip on women, or rather on our bodies. With its passage, we learn to grow aware of it, to fear the violence it attracts. It is hard to feel at home when your home is constantly invaded, appropriated, robbed.
My story is no different. Over the years, I have learned to live with a body I don't feel safe in. My relationship with it isn't built on safety, confidence, playfulness; but rather fear. It is hard to experience freedom when you are constantly in a battle with yourself, under the scrutiny of others, seeking to be praised rather than to feel.
Once I became aware of the toxicity of my relationship with my body, I realized I had to set off on a journey to heal it. After all, I could always remember how I felt in it when I was a child and remembering my childhood always filled with a melancholy, a longing for a time when I wasn't at war with myself.
The first and most important lesson I had to learn was that my body didn't attract violence but was rather designated to receive it. As Julieta Parades bluntly puts it, it was on the bodies of women that humanity learned how to dominate. Despite the barrage of reminders of this truth, especially on social media, I have to choose every day to refuse to be the ground on which society enacts its principles and charts its progress.
Most days I fail to. But some days, I know what's it feels like to be at home in my body. On those days, I am free. I am in water, I remember how to play, I am the child.
There is melancholy in this piece, but there is also peace. Using a process in part procedural, and in part expressive, I attempted to capture a piece of my freedom. The result is a loop of animated pixels simulating my physical embodiment, its capacity for remembrance, and the complexity of unlearning violence.
