The language of corpses

                                                                Luísa Dalgalarrondo*

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         Frankenstein always comes to my mind when I think about Carolina Bianchi: the terror, the passion, the being that is alive, but is also kind of dead, all the creator vs. creature implications. Giving birth to a new creature out of the past. Out of the dead.

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         When I was giving birth to my child, I tried very hard to fight the pain, to use every meditation exercise I knew to deal with it. At some point, I understood I had to go through the pain. To let myself fall into the pain, into the vortex of the pain and cross it to the other side. Like someone who goes through a desert. You cannot ignore it, you cannot avoid it, you don’t simply deal with the desert. Bianchi is going through a desert here.

Bianchi developed most of her work in an environment of intense precarity, mostly without any sort of funds, and surrounded by a political context that puts art workers and women constantly in their target. Her work is also moved by the desire to survive this reality. And she is not alone in this attempt. Some of the people in this project have been working with her since the Dark Ages, but many of them came around through workshops or classes coordinated by Bianchi. The intensity of her passions put into practice in these situations creates a sort of magnetism that makes people want to keep exploring with her, creating images with her.

         Bianchi is always giving birth to vertiginous images. Images, images, images. It could be said that her recent works were all built in frames, but I believe “layers” can describe them better. Layers as a structure of something that comes to cover what was recently seen, often blurring the lines that seemed to be defined by the anterior layer.

         CADELA FORÇA is a bunch of layers of corpses of women. And then, it is also a bunch of layers of things that are covering those women. How do we touch a dead body? How do we approach a crime scene? Isn’t the whole world an immense crime scene played in a loop in space in the end? Is it possible to communicate through the language of corpses?

         As she intends to do this “autopsy” in CADELA FORÇA, Bianchi is not exactly a coroner – I cannot imagine her separating pieces and cataloguing them until she arrives at an unequivocal answer. It wouldn’t be honest to present a solution. She is not going to explain or represent what happened. Ever. But what happens if she flirts with an impossible revenge? Not to achieve it, but to see what happens. What if she attempts an impossible resurrection? What if she survives?

         Bianchi will not solve a crime here. CADELA FORÇA will not prevent any future crime. But maybe this work will open a new dark hole in space and it will swallow everything. Maybe not.
 

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Luísa Dalgalarrondo é pesquisadora, integrante do Coletivo Cara de Cavalo e colaborou com o processo de criação do trabalho "Capítulo 1 - Trilogia Cadela Força - A noiva e o Boa Noite Cinderela". Esse texto foi escrito para a brochura de apresentação dos trabalhos de conclusão de mestrado na DAS - Academy of theater and dance, em 2022.