“Even the Night Has a Heart” investigates the trauma inherited from my mother’s life experiences, marked by the violence exerted by patriarchal family ties. The work is composed of multiple parts, combining the reworking of family photographs with the performative use of my body, re-signifying it from the weight of the inheritance. The work particularly focuses on traumas that, although shrouded in silence, deeply influence the emotional and identity dimensions.
This complex matrilineal inheritance, in which the women of my family have endured profound and often unheard pain, led me to understand how pain, often denied or hidden by patriarchal society, can leave deep scars. These women, in turn, internalized and made patriarchal violence their own, unconsciously perpetuating it and thus fueling the mandate of masculinity that I intend to deconstruct, starting with myself.
Exploring family history from the margins and traces left by our ancestors. To journey in the darkness of what has not yet been illuminated. To delve into the opacity of what remains in the shadows. In a manoeuvre that involves articulating memories, fragments that, in a tension between what has been lived and what has been reconstructed in memory, appear as images that subtly and violently penetrate our unconscious.
In this project, Valentina Fusco works, on the one hand, from old photographs of the women in her family: pieces that act as vestiges, remnants and traces of past lives, echoes of family secrets and wounds. Fusco invites us to traverse the border between the fragility of memory and the evanescence of these images, weaving a space where personal history and collective memory emerge towards healing.
And then, through records of ephemeral and fundamental actions—feeling the texture of a stone after receiving the savage fury of the waves, holding the body in the mist that unfolds like memory stretching across generations—a transmuted presence emerges. Interwoven in the tension between what is and what was, memory unfolds as an intimate and, at the same time, universal act.
Presence. Transmutation.
The meeting of a butterfly’s wings recalls the subtlety with which family secrets lie hidden deep within, like a truth barely perceptible beneath the surface. Just as waves repeatedly strike a rock on the shore, those secrets—secretly woven into generations—erode and shape our lives. With each impact, the rock is transformed, shedding layers, just as we, confronted with the past and its untold truths, are transformed. The butterfly and its free flight embody the possibility of transcending this legacy; a symbol that, by facing these secrets, we find a new way of being, light and liberated, emerging renewed in an act of individual transformation.Lucia Von Sprecher
By the sea. “I’ve heard this music before” said the body.
Memory rescues truth by reinventing it, and thus offers—both through art and through the craft of psychoanalysis—the possibility of achieving the impossible: changing the past.
That dense fog of memory.
How far are we from ourselves?
The past dwells in the house of time.
Roots growing towards the sky.
