S a g e C a n e l l i s
A Transgenerational Healing Project
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The experience of a trauma - whatever happens to us - the bad things that happened and the good things that did not happen - cannot be named, cannot be understood, cannot be properly ordered in our minds. Specially not with or through words. Because in case of trauma, the language center gets compromised. So, without language, our traumatic experience gets stored as fragments of memory, fragments of language, body sensations, some images, some emotions, even smells and of course dreams. All entangled. It's like the mind disperses. Things gets disrupted and some essential elements get separated. We lose the story, and by doing so, we are unable to heal and to make space for peace. Yet, the pieces aren't lost. They have simply been rerouted.
Looking at these old and beautiful photographs of grand mothers - with or without their families - I allowed a "non-verbal" language to emerge. By adding new layers into their narrative, layers made of non-words, I birthed them into another story.
The intention with this project is to gather and mix different types of languages - reality and dream - nightmare and imagination - human and non human - revelation and possibility - true or false. I have connected certain dots, but there are so many more.
The project "If my Grand Mother was..." gives all our ancestors a hundred other lives, a hundred other ways of being an ancestor.
«My memory is proglottidean, like the tapeworm, but unlike the tapeworm it has no head, it wanders in a maze, and any point may be the beginning or the end of its journey. I must wait for the memories to come of their own accord, following their own logic» Umberto Eco
For some years now, embryologists know that the female cell line stops dividing in the womb, which means when your grand mother is five months pregnant with your mother, the egg that will one day become us is already present in our mother's womb, which is herself in grandma's womb. What do you think the implications are when three generations are present in a grandmother's womb? What do you think the implications are when you know that a mother's emotions can be chemically communicated to the foetus through the placenta, and that can biochemically alter genetic expression?