Isabela Matus
These pieces, inspired by the Symposium and the book of poems Uninvited, made me reflect and strengthen past questions about romantic love. It was more than evident that Western culture develops from the segregation of women. It is thus that this absence, this shadow that many of them left in the discourses of Western thought, built what today is thought and believed to be love.
Plato is recognized for creating this important work on love, but few recognize the only female participation in the entire Platonic work, which falls on the lips of Diotima in this Platonic text. She is the one who then teaches Plato about the nature of love. These pieces were formed around a personal lack of love built under the fantasy of romantic love: at that moment eros also possessed me, while the loved one whispered in my ear and I fell into a blinding spiral of this erotic creative power that represents eros. My beloved had decided to get away from me and I could not pursue him or ask him to stay because no human should appear to the beloved, only the one who loves can be prey to eros when it turns into penia. And that was what I went through in the moment of all this creative process: this collaboration was revealed to me then, as an aesthetic phenomenological experience, but at the same time as a mystical, religious and spiritual experience that fell on two main gods, eros and aphrodite.
But the force of eros did not fade, the days and weeks passed and my stomach swallowed itself. So while I read and reread the Symposium, that heartbreak became a video performance, in the present my deepest feeling to heal not only that present, but also the past of all my ancestors, those grandmothers and great-grandmothers who surely also suffered love. After the ceremony, the prayers and the ritual had a positive effect.
On the other hand, and as part of the transdisciplinary narrative of this piece, I selected a series of photographs that represent the presence of women in the processes of healing and renewal: female friends that we also love, who accompany us when romantic love whips our bodies and the thoughts. A dance video emerged that reflects on: who taught Diotima about love? The answer is that it was other women sharing and healing each other, strengthening and creating; while men make war, women heal wounds.
I understood that the gods and goddesses inhabit us constantly; that the platonic triad of beauty, justice and truth occurs only if we have the body, the mind and the spirit willing to receive with grace the gift of these beings that make us vulnerable to the other. That love can never be unfair and that eros, no matter how much it drags us to the depths, will always be present as Dionysus, the indestructible root of life.