TOUTES LES LARMES DE MON CORPS
2024
Egyptian cotton, cotton threads , embroidery
About
On October 8, 2023, my father succumbed to a sudden illness, plunging me for the first time into the ineffable abyss of death... Confronted with the absurdity and vastness of the beyond, my reason found itself disarmed, and words proved powerless to express the unspeakable nature of his passing. In the raw awakening of this loss, where only physical pain can testify to my suffering, tears became my ultimate language. They forged a new bodily script, a feminine writing where voice falls silent, sight blurs, and visage contorts, yet a new vocabulary emerges, laden with evocations of excess, the beyond, the invisible, the unspeakable, the untranslatable.
Unable to find meaning in my sorrow, I sought solace in my Greek cultural roots and in the rites of Egypt, the country where I reside. In antiquity, professional mourners were enlisted to express through their tears, prayers, moans, cries, sobs, and dramatic gestures the loss, the fragility of life, and the importance of human bonds. Egyptian and Greek art abound with depictions of these scenes of lamentation, where mourners strike their chests and weep ostentatiously. The mourning takes on a profoundly feminine dimension there. As protagonists and guardians of funeral rituals, mediators between the living and the dead, women embody universal grief, carrying through their bodies collective sorrow. Their tears attest to the sincerity and intensity of the felt pain, and the blows to their chests signify that the anguish emanates from the depths of the soul.
The practice of lamentation, which sometimes persists to this day, symbolizes not only personal grief but also resonates as an echo of all grieving souls, enabling the community to share their sorrow and find a form of catharsis. The chest, sanctuary of emotions and heart, becomes a symbol as potent as tear-filled eyes. Tears streaming down the bruised chest render grief visible and palpable, creating a public demonstration of suffering and strengthening communal bonds in the collective expression of mourning.
The tapestry series “Toutes les larmes de mon corps” ("All the tears of my body”) draws inspiration from this ancient iconography centered on the feminine form and the relationship between tears and chest, offering a narrative of mourning navigating from the collective to the personal, from pain to sorrow, from tears shed by the body to those born of the soul.
