The Archive of Silence

2024

This project is a conceptual and metaphysical representation of one of the dramatic moments in the existence of humanity, namely clandestine abortion during the period of communism in Romania, forbidden and punished for both those who asked for it and also for those who performed the procedure.
This led to great losses both in terms of women’s health and lives and to an alarming increase in the number of children abandoned at birth.
Abortion, wanted or unwanted, is a situation of intense crisis for everyone.
The curettage toolkit featured in this project belonged to my grandmother, a nurse by profession, whom I have always known to be very religious, even rigorous with conservative values. Many years after her death I came into possession of these ustensils, about whose existence and the very fact that she performed this procedure clandestinely I knew nothing about.
It is precisely the secrecy of this fact, with meaning almost reaching mysticism, the duality of death/life, or perhaps even interrupting (ending)/saving life, the courage to experience these moments from the point of view of the doer/saviour, with severe risks and repercussions if discovered that led me to the more unconventional approach of presenting these objects.
The visual representation, in which the instruments are projected onto a piece of glass or gauze photosensitized by the cyanotype technique and then toned in brownish black renders the drama, perhaps even the tragedy of the moment very virulently and subtly underlines this existential moment.
Blackened, shaded images, the traces of the instruments being cut out in white, like a medical Röntgen image, the represantations brought to an almost abstract visuality, in which the moment of development, the technical accidents, the breaking of the photosensitive gelatin have their correspondence in the meaning of risk, uncertainty, accidents in the abortion procedure but also in the making of the images.