Icarus is Eve
Video animation: andfe22
Music: dinghi | Hannes Peyer
Text: SoloFrancesca
Drawing of Eve: Giulia (after a photo by Francesca Woodman)
Nude drawings: SoloFrancesca | 15-minute poses
Thanks for the inspiration and support to:
Manuela Strasser | kameleon
crazy wise man
Jaume and Cicciuzzo
The idea was born during a procession in the studio. Or rather, more than a procession, an artistic stalking—unexpected and unpredictable in its process. Random acts of kindness with zero suspicion.
"Make yourself a coffee as if you were at home. I’ll listen to you, but I won’t look at you; I’ll just keep painting."
On the almost bare walls, three sketches. Three 15-minute poses—nervous, inaccurate, nostalgic, and bleeding.
Like a thousand others I have locked away in drawers over the last two and a half years (and perhaps one day I’ll do something with them…).
In the meantime, the ‘crazy wise man’ led me hand in hand to my dear Icarus and then vanished into thin air.
What remains, however, is the gratitude for words that were not spoken lightly, and for the associations of ideas that raced through my head, my compulsive typing, and my breath—sometimes as if there were no tomorrow.
Giulia drew only a few lines during the lockdown, or perhaps shortly after, between one puzzle and the next—but they were magnificent and elegant. Black on white, essential and impactful, like the hermetic clarity of M’illumino d’immenso.
A self-portrait by Francesca Woodman, shattered, sharp as a broken mirror.
That is how my Eve was born, the alter ego of a genderless Icarus.
He overlaps her like an insolent, curious angel; like a Lucifer who brings light but creates your hell in return.
This contradiction burns and will always burn within us—within us thinking and feeling beings—as the price we pay to stay alive without being the living dead.
A risk that sometimes becomes an unavoidable urgency, but much more often is just dust settling sluggishly under the rugs of our imperfect existences.
So, let us proudly claim our sins and our weaknesses, our mistakes and our defeats.
And let us redeem our Eve and our Icarus—who live within us and in a thousand other beings, labeled for millennia as sinners, the haughty, the last, and the defeated.
Elsewhere
Unbearably loud silence.
Heart in the snow.
Poetry includes everything and forgives.
Like no one ever,
until proven otherwise.
I would like to be able to expand
the nights of the heroines.
Icarus is Eve.
Icarus is us.
SoloFrancesca
(From a nightly fascination with/for Sylvia Plath)
Harder than any spring
How do you do it?
Just once.
To forget oneself. To forget yourself.
With and without the accent.
Like a lethargy.
To disappear. Oublier.
The difference between the necessary
and the superfluous.
Mutually contradictory.
You are enjoying yourself. And that frost in the eyes.
Goodnight attempts.
Icarus, Eve—what is it?
What is harder,
staying or leaving?
SoloFrancesca