My project is about closeness with mom. In my childhood, my mother almost never was near. First because of her second marriage, then because of her alcoholism. And then she completely disappeared.
My childhood passed in an attempt to hide and protect myself from the label “orphan”. The world was so terrible to me, so full of pain, that from an early age I noticed that my body was losing its sensitivity, becoming overgrown with armor. Years later, I realized that this was the only way to survive. I put on a mask and felt pain and cold, put on another and another, and so on until I no longer had contact with the world. The masks grew into me and became my face. It was only as an adult, removing one layer after another, that I was able to realize how many of them I was wearing.
For 15 years I didn’t know about my mother, but I continued to look for her, not even knowing if she was still alive. I remember her as a young woman. I often saw faces in the crowd that looked like hers, but I could only compare each one to a frozen image from my childhood.
I didn’t recognize her when we met. I saw a strange woman with my mother’s eyes.
