Hedgehog's shadows
Melancholy Maaret states in her website that "Tarkovsky's polaroids Are Better Than asteroids" which is already a strong statement of visual and poetic principles. To penetrate her universe leads us to hermetic feelings, almost suffocating. Shadows and grey shades are here the framework for our existential traumas carried since our childhood. Alice felt as a wonder a world fruit of the passage of the darkest dreams and desires, where the strict social norms appear blatantly ridiculous and hurtful with impunity. Melancholy runs through this passage and creates a world of sirens that belong to the secret sauna we all have inside. Poet, photographer, video artist, has an insatiable need to show our hidden corners, which are also yours.
Nora Helmer's daughter is a work in which Maaret shows us the bones of the lie between a mother and her daughter. It is the fifth piece in the series Naive ComputerOpera for Heroine and Hedgehog, video-poetry project that includes music and visual installations whose last creative phase will use the live movement. "Each story can exist on its own, and every story also is a russian doll, breathing inside the other stories". Thus, Maaret invites us to discover layers in her work but also in our own soul.
Nora Helmer's daughter is a work in which Maaret shows us the bones of the lie between a mother and her daughter. It is the fifth piece in the series Naive ComputerOpera for Heroine and Hedgehog, video-poetry project that includes music and visual installations whose last creative phase will use the live movement. "Each story can exist on its own, and every story also is a russian doll, breathing inside the other stories". Thus, Maaret invites us to discover layers in her work but also in our own soul.
Initially, the negative image of a hedgehog illustrates Maaret’s voice, here the daughter of Nora Helmer, whispering Mamma ... I pretend to be you. The dreams and desires of mother and daughter are here confronted in the daughter’s whisper, seeking the border between their existences, and individuality becomes a distant goal for both of them since the same birth. What do you become, mamma? Are you an artist like me? The daughter walks through her own vision of her mother again and again wondering about their own identity. You're an oil painting, I am the sea, old lady, you cannot love anyone, your own heart in a nutcracker ... One senses the idea of the mother creating the daughter beyond her birth, trying to influence on her identity which always becomes something impossible and is painful because that attempt never results innocuous. The video shades are streaming from the grey to blue, green, red and pink pastel, in a blurred air, not too much defined. The images are purely domestic objects seen as a prison, not as freedom spaces. Now is the time for the child breaks that chain the mother also suffered with their parents. The quintessence of life is grace over perdition ... The ghosts created by traditional beliefs and customs, all the resignations early assumed because our desire of being socially accepted and then imposed to our children because our lack courage in life.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo and video by Melancholy Maaret (Secret Sauna Sirens)