Born from salt
Viviana Bonura is a photographer, graphic designer and multimedia artist located in Palermo, Italy. She studies towards a Bachelor's degree in Graphic Design at the Academy Of Fine Arts. Born from salt — is her current and ongoing project from 2020, in which she explores the central theme of identity through self-portraits. Through symbolism and work with objects such as an egg, a bone, scissors, Viviana strips off cultural and societal structures and norms to research the pure human form. Viviana speaks of her approach, “I stage attempts at symbolically returning to the chrysalis of birth, reinterpreting it as a search of my own skin.”
Born from salt — is also an attempt to reconcile with personal traumas and hereditary traumas passed from one generation to the next one. The process requires a deeper understanding of oneself, composed of past and present experiences, memories, and interpretations. With the desire to go back to the origin of being born and being disconnected from the mother, one of the first forgotten memories, Viviana’s work comes to present the pain and the longing for knowledge to learn about the self. We close the interview with Viviana telling a story of selling the family house, the emotional background, and the way of dealing with the decision her mother made. Eventually leading to acceptance and awareness, “I soon realised that my mom was going through the exact same thing I was talking about in my project, just on different levels, and I live for these metaphors.”
‘Born from salt’ is about the re-narration of one’s story, starting from the identity dilemma that comes with finding about the origins of one’s way of being in the world and the subsequent research to deconstruct oneself through the recomposition of one’s overstructures.
What is the project Born from salt about?
'Born from salt' is about the re-narration of one’s story, starting from the identity dilemma that comes with finding about the origins of one’s way of being in the world and the subsequent research to deconstruct oneself through the recomposition of one’s overstructures. These concepts are approached as a one-voice dialogue in which I stage attempts at symbolically returning to the chrysalis of birth, reinterpreting it as a search of my own skin. Rejoin my initial form to understand when things began to unstuck, to fracture, to recompose them inside myself, to break the tight mesh of hereditary traumas without implying fracturing by dissolving and delineating my boundaries with respect to my inner and outer world, experiencing new forms of the absence of containment.
The project’s name comes from a dream which revealed to me that originally each one of us is born from some kind of matter that marks who we are. Rejoining and recognizing it means exorcising it and regaining possession of one’s existence. Returning to one’s subject is a rite of passage. I was born from salt. White as my skin, still and heavy, like a dead man. Salt inside which a primordial pain was preserved intact and was handed down to me at the moment of birth.
'Born from salt' is the acceptance process that takes place by assigning a name and a reason to this feeling to reclaim it. Salt, after all, in some stories, is the protagonist of many superstitious rites: it is a sign of bad luck if thrown on the table by mistake, but it is also a powerful purifier from negative energies. Salt drives monsters away.
‘I got myself into one-to-one therapy first and then to group therapy to understand generational trauma, the importance of resounding with the issues of others to find new perspectives about one’s own related issues.’
In terms of the research that comes as a critical step before the project launches, which themes were important for you to analyze and understand more deeply?
I won’t tiptoe around it. It took a lot of self-reflection and introspection, a lot of questioning about the connection between my personal story and my parents', my issues as an individual, and as part of a much larger collective of people.
I got myself into one-to-one therapy first and then to group therapy to understand generational trauma, the importance of resounding with the issues of others to find new perspectives about one’s own related issues, working around the Hows and the Whys we act this 'resounding' dynamic, and we replicate certain comportamental patterns, the narrative around delineating boundaries and developing your own skin.
So, there was a lot of research within psychology, sociology, and intense studies about photographic aesthetics to understand how to build a new vocabulary of symbolisms and concepts, which had to be very encrypted, as much as our minds, when we talk about sedimented memories and patterns we absorbed very early in our lives and are part of our unconscious, almost like if they are something primordial.
‘With photography, I practice the act of being present. Whether I want it or not, or I'm conscious about it, shooting a self-portrait or, in general, shooting a photo means taking space, taking a stance in some way.’
With self-portraiture, how does the exploration of the self as a subject during the process affects the development of the chosen topic?
With the risk of seeming to go off-topic, to answer this question, I’m going to put it from a more performative arts standpoint rather than a photographic one. I’m borrowing an excerpt from something I wrote not long ago about the act of performing and the artist’s presence, which explains the reasons behind performing individual behaviours into collectivity in the first person.
“There’s something I experience, which is being in a constant state of feeling the lack of space I need — space to talk, space to walk, literally the space I occupy as a human being. I struggle with the perception of space, in relation to me too, as I tend to take as little as possible. Whenever there's space, I disappear, I blend in, and I stand out at the same time, and with 'disappearing', I mean I feel lost — in my words, in my mind — and I get hyper-vigilant and self-controlling. I have become absent at the moment. This is what in therapy they called 'dissociation'. Pretty much, it is like a disconnection happens. It's like stopping to feel like yourself.
With photography, I’m not allowed to function like that, and self-portraiture naturally comes from a response to this pattern of mine. With photography, I practice the act of being present. Whether I want it or not, or I'm conscious about it, shooting a self-portrait or, in general, shooting a photo means taking space, taking a stance in some way. I reconnect to myself even if there's a performative attitude so it can be perceived as on a different level from reality, therefore a form of disconnection, of dissociation. But it is totally different from performing in a social situation because of social pressure or social-related dysfunctions as well. It makes me question what it means to separate real-life behaviours and artistic expression, for example, the theatrical elaboration of a real-life event. I ask myself if drawing a line is really needed, and I figured out I don't care, or better, in a big constellation of the questions I want to ask myself while navigating life and art, I figured out this is not the kind of question I'm looking for.
Another term I can borrow from what I learned in my therapeutic journey, which helped me to frame better the words for my question, is 'psychodrama', a therapeutic technique implemented through a theatrical representation of the patient's psychic conflict, in which the patient participates.
Performative arts, visual arts, photography... it's all the same. You act out what you feel more or less unconsciously, it's just coded differently, and it's for everyone to see. It's not hiding, it's unveiling. Marina Abramović collected her works under the title 'The Artist is Present', and I believe her. It's true, you can't make contemporary art, and you can't understand it, without considering as the most important thing, the artist's individuality and the artist's presence, even if it's just their point of thought, their conceptual output.
Bringing into the art piece our personal experience is an active way of experiencing the artwork itself, and it holds so much power. I know I’m asking a lot. I know I’m demanding a movement. Perhaps, moving the user from my psychodrama to theirs is everything I look for, and I precisely refer to this when I endlessly repeat that I want my art to create ambiguity and a sense of discomfort in who sees it because there is a profound conflict in experiencing the sense of intimacy and distance at the same time. I bring you to my deepest, most human places where all the horror, the trauma, and the desire lies and make you experience it, but you are not me, you feel profoundly different but similar, maybe you are relieved because I’m transfigurating it for you, or maybe you’re mourning with me because you’re thinking that it can happen to you too, just like death. And from there, you are further moved because you connected it to your personal experience and have to decide how deep you want to go.”
‘There is always something that has to happen within an image for me, it's the manifestation of an internal process in the exterior world, like a spell, and for sure, it's very symbolic as everything in my photography is.’
For this journey — the process of returning to the roots and refinding oneself, you add elements such as an egg, scissors, a bone, even a fly that appears in the frame. The objects come as a disruption leading the viewer to ask questions. What is the symbolic importance behind the choice of these elements?
I’m glad you mentioned there are elements that lead to asking questions. It’s the whole thing with contemporary art, and I’m thinking about when I used the term 'point of thought', just before when talking with you. It’s not a random choice of words. The first thing I saw when my Professor introduced their Phenomenology of Contemporary Art course was a piece by Alighiero Boetti, a colorful tapestry that spelled 'point of thought' like an encrypted puzzle. This is the enigma of contemporary art, which has traumatized society by making us ask ourselves questions about what we are seeing. This is a conceptual problem, and it starts from the artist's point of view.
What I do is very conceptual, so it seems just right to raise questions. More than often, the body getting in contact and interacting with these objects is the performance itself that happens within the picture. There is always something that has to happen within an image for me, it's the manifestation of an internal process in the exterior world, like a spell, and for sure, it's very symbolic as everything in my photography is. I translate this connection between emotions and their manifestation through gestures and objects — and of course their interaction.
I keep a book where I instinctively scribble words about the correspondence between an object and its symbolic meaning. Some objects either have a ritualistic value — like the egg which symbolises birth, parturition, and containment, or the scissors which symbolise severing and separation — or are closely related to my writing process — like the bee which describes a sort of sting I feel in my chest when I feel anguish, and I refer to it as 'the bee sting' — which I use to elaborate feelings and events and is full of imagery that eventually becomes a part of my artworks.
Which moment or image from this project is most memorable to you?
For sure, the moment when the question of inheritance manifested under a very concrete and practical real-life situation. Sometime around December 2020, my mom had to sell the home she grew up in, which belonged to her parents before belonging to her after their death. It was her inheritance, and giving it away was a painful and difficult experience. Nobody in my family knew how to vocalise what not being able to see that house again meant.
The last time I visited the house it was empty and there was no electricity, therefore no light. There was nothing left of what that place used to be. I stripped down naked just as the rooms were and took some self-portraits. After two hours my back was hurting and I was covered in dust and dirt. It was for sure the most intense and psychologically challenging self-portrait experience I had. I soon realised that my mom was going through the exact same thing I was talking about in my project, just on different levels, and I live for these metaphors.
