My current artistic project “Within my Walls and Beyond“ invites the viewer to discover different realities of Communism and the Aftermath of the Fall of the Iron Curtain through photography, as well as theatre and dance.
Whenever I travel to another part of the world I look for traces of communism and stories on the aftermath of the fall of the Iron Curtain. It’s all about reference points that reconnect me to my identity that is no longer tied to a geographical location.
My project in Paris is a continuation of the series on „Within my Walls and Beyond“. It is reminiscent of my identity, my childhood and my home. Looking for traces tied to Communism in Paris, I researched the Headquarter of the French Communist Party (PCF). It represents for me a landmark similar to the Berlin Wall. It was built by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer during his time in exile in France. He was a communist who sought exile during the military dictatorship.
Niemeyer’s architecture was also for him a reference point of what was home. “I am attracted to free-flowing, sensual curves. The curves that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean…“, as much as it was “an attempt to make this unjust world a better world in which we live”. Once I had entered the Niemeyer building the forms and shapes of its walls took me beyond my journey down memory lane, to my childhood home.
Niemeyer’s free and sensual curves gave me a desire to explore the fundamental nature of being and my identity as a woman in the then, now and the future. I captured beautiful curves in the undulating French Communist Party building in Paris within and outside the womb-like cupola, which is a symbol for the emancipation of humanity as well as my own and is also a representation of the sisterhood that developed between my subject, Lila, and I.
