Ana Maria Farina

In a future where the oppressed sex will no longer repress, a new kind of imagery is born. Hysterical fiber paintings scream in a language that comes before any language. The woman’s body is reimagined and reinstated as the primal source of power and creation, a home of its own. Hysteria in this context is not seen as a weakness anymore; women are not stigmatized because of it. Hysteria is instead understood as a feminine, visceral manifestation of one’s unconscious, once repressed and consequently expressed through involuntary bodily reactions such as numbness, fainting, and stuttering.

In this effort to reclaim the past, I create the future. And in doing so, I release goddesses and entities of the unseen from the depths of my (and maybe your) unconscious.

In this feminist sci-fi reality, trauma accumulated through centuries is invited into the visual world, and it is angry. It brings, now voluntarily, symptoms in the form of visual elements: stuttering as repetitive stitching, colors that yell, numbness turned into an explosion. What does trauma look like? What can anger be transformed into? Through obsessively, compulsively stabbing a fabric with a yarn gun, the unseen takes shape.

MFA Painting and Drawing