The experience
In a rundown apartment overlooking the busy Rustaveli avenue
in Tbilisi, a series of nine live exhibition-performances were given
by an international group of multidisciplinary artists: the Heroines.
Visitors entered the apartment in silence, greeted by a guide who
explained the sequence of the next hour to them. They would take
off their shoes, she said, and turn off their phones. Then, they
would be guided throughout all the rooms, in a journey in the
depth of female intimacy. The experience could be disorienting,
she warned, filled with unfamiliar smells and sounds. But it could
also, perhaps, recall personal experiences and feelings, like very old
memories being stirred and brought back to life. " Memories of our
absolute, undeniable, and irrevocable kinship with the wild
feminine ", writes the storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Meanwhile,
a dissonant buzzing and humming kept getting louder from the
next room.
The guide opened that door, and invited our guests to enter and
sit down. Inside, along the walls and in the corners, fourteen
women were standing, adorned with branches and dry flowers,
singing together a dizzying harmonic drone that filled the room. A
biting odour was present everywhere, affirming that visitors had
now entered a wild, sincere, fierce universe: the Enclosed Garden.
And we sang:
“ Enclosed Garden, where my fears and desires
Fill my Cornucopia of flowers.
To better gaze up on the night,
I am standing on the shore of my life.
Moon after moon, I contemplate the desert,
This wildness where my soul remains locked.
To better gaze up on the night,
I am standing to the shore of... nothing. ”
(Celia Stroom, Poems of Illusions, 2019)
And we left. One by one, visitors followed us through the Forest, a
long corridor filled with branches and plants and shards. In a
diaphane light, at the end, a tall woman sang, distressed by her
love lost, amidst the sounds of the forest in an evening storm.
Further on, a woman is in her bedroom. She speaks of her past, of
her mother, of her father who was sent away to prison for ten years
during the Soviet rule in Georgia. She shares her pictures, unafraid
to show her vulnerability, her sadness, her fears. Everyone cries in
the room. " Stories are medicine. ...They have such power; they do
not require that we do, be, act anything –we need only listen. The
remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are
contained in stories. Stories engender the excitement, sadness,
questions, longings, and understandings that bring [...] the Wild
Woman back to the surface... " (Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who
Run with the Wolves, 1992).
From a cupboard in the wall, a thin, naked creature emerges,
surrounded by dry flowers and fabrics and nail polish and jewels.
She. Is she like these objects that surround her? In the grey
bathroom, we contemplate the void. Water drips on the pipes, and
someone is clipping their nails up above. A video installation
reflects this feeling of emptiness. Lost voices can be heard in the
corners of this bathroom.