Thirty Days
In 2017, I was invited by the Bulgarian magazine SVEMA to present a project in their pages. I chose to explore my relationship with my body over 30 days through self-portraits and notes. The work became a diary during moments of intense physical pain - caused by my menstrual cycle - examined over the same period of time as what was causing the suffering. Dancing around this topic, it was never directly named by me, but was still present in subtle ways.
The connection to the body is a dotted line. A secret you keep from yourself. That’s why it’s easy not to think about it. For you, the self-portrait becomes a revolution - there is nothing natural about this gaze. The proportions get all wrong. The piece of paper is, in your eyes, never big enough or small enough.
You’re not looking for the body in pain, the body that seduces or the one that sleeps. Only for the body that is. That you are.
For a second I’m disoriented by the question “Why am I so fixated at my neck?”. And then I realize the answer - I’m looking for the connection to my body.
This broken connection is visible in how I can’t simply draw/feel my body, but I also need to write/think about my body. Both those things together.
I draw myself in awkward poses so that I can watch myself; at the end of the process I see red bruises everywhere; the spots I was most careless with bloom into blue a few days later.