Planting A Garden In The Basement Of My Soul
How To Bring Light Into My Own Shadow
If you are new or have landed on Tarantula: Authors and Art for the very first time, welcome to to the meditative text of out newest contributor, the Lithuanian photographer and journalist Kristina Aleksynaitè. If a friend forwarded you this article, double welcome; if you like it, share it or why not subscribe?
Every spring, just before my birthday, I go into the basement of my soul. After celebrating and rejoicing in the achievements of the previous year, I open the door to the black spots, which I have buried away from sight during this last year.
Somewhere lurking deep in our own shadows, we will always find the demon that we are afraid to face. After drawing a few of them, as Karen Grace advised in her article "Play With Your Demons," I laughed and decide to dig deeper.
A Shadow Needs Light
Before I start this process, I always carry in my mind the knowledge that to see our shadow we need light in order that we don't break down. When the light shines, the shadows are not so scary.
For a while, I close myself off at home from social networks, events, and friends. I scrub the house, prolong my meditations, fast, and spend hours walking by the lake or in the forest.
I buy seedlings, put my hands in the soil of my new home and nourish them as babies; but plants nourish me back as I pick some edible beauties near my home.
… until I feel ready to take a deep breath and to start a conversation on the painful topics I didn't want to face.
This spring, I'm calling on the work of this month's Tarantula: Authors And Art's artist of the month Sandra Vasquez de la Horra.
Sandra's work invites all kinds of women - prostitutes, mothers, shamans, goddesses - to start a conversation, and I'm caught up in its creative magic. Looking at one artwork after another, I reflect on which of my demon shadows of the past year they evoke.
Identity
First, I start with the question of identity. The Chilean-born, Berlin-based artist talks about migration in the broadest sense as a question of our existence.
I am looking at her work “América Sin Fronteras”. The drawing speaks to us of “passages, displacements and transnational humans, showing us a Mother Earth that people enter and exit in total freedom, in the fluidity of confines.” (Rubina Romanelli, Magazzino, Sandra Vasquez de la Horra, Selected works 2010-2020)
She asks how much is Latin America still in her, in this broader sense.
The theme of migration has been central for me this year. I moved from Lithuania to Sweden. The decision was somewhat unexpected. Having grown up in a homogenous community, in a small country, I thought I would remain in my Lithuanian cocoon forever, but now a whole other world is opening.
Why was this transition so painful for me? Who am I here? What kind of artist am I, what kind of journalist am I, who knows me here? It seems I must reinvent everything, I have to deconstruct myself from the beginning.
On the other hand, the world that has opened gives me the opportunity to be bolder, to experiment. In the end, Mother Earth still embraces me wherever I live.
Am I too scared of the vastness of the world?
I loosen the earth in the pot and plant a beautiful rose. My mother's garden always smells of roses. And now, I will have a rose garden in Stockholm.
Adaptation
Growing up under the oppression of the Soviet Union, and then experiencing all the hardships Lithuania had to go through to build a state during the coup, I feel a great need to adapt.
The totalitarian system taught me: "don't talk, don't show off, listen to the other person until they finish talking".
When I look at Sandra’s artwork “La Verdad Es Demasiado Grande” (The Truth Is Too Big,) I see myself standing in a whirlpool of influences. Society, relatives, the great truths of how we should or ought to live, who is a good mother, woman, profession. How I should position or present myself in various ecosystems of professional and private life.
I ask myself how many times have I abandoned myself in an attempt to fit in this year? How many times have I sacrificed my creations for the sake of family peace and stability? How many times have I trusted that someone else's opinion is more valuable? It breaks my heart.
"The Truth is Too Big" is written on the drawing of Sandra Vasquez de la Horra. I can no longer hide this shadow of inferiority. I get up and plant a forget-me-not plant to remember how valuable I am.
Body remembers everything
When I moved to Stockholm, I lost the ground under my feet. I felt like I had lost my home. Where is it? I looked at the beautiful garden we had moved into, full of apple trees, ripe raspberries and currants, and was not happy. Nothing looked beautiful or tasty.
Then the war in Ukraine broke out, and I lost my body completely. Everything shook for weeks. Having experienced first-hand what it is like to live under oppression, I felt as if my own nation was under attack again. The subconscious trauma was so painful that I could neither eat nor sleep. My parents and friends were left behind with aggressive neighbours – Russia and Belarus – right next door, and a nuclear power plant just half an hour away from Vilnius. Painful news and images, the tears of relatives and a refugee woman from Ukraine taking shelter in my studio back home …
I was floating in the air and am still a little wobbly.
However, I look at Sandra Vasquez de la Horra's “Yo Soy Casa” and I feel at peace. This sculpture is her autobiographical work about having a home and not looking for another. Her migration ends here.
For me, this work gives me hope that my inner and outer garden will grow; that by slowly nurturing every corner of my skin and living space, I can build a solid, peaceful home; my body will feel the ground again.
I bring all the nutritious herbs - basil, lemon balm, oregano, rosemary - together in one and plant them in a large pot. They will remind me that everything that is nurtured eventually repays you in kindness.
Vitality
In her interview for Hyper Art, Sandra declares that her work is mostly unconscious, and more like a diary of her life. Looking at her art, I realized that we all share different but common experiences. One woman's creativity, felt and shared openly, can evoke the most painful shadows of my own basement.
As soon as I name the demons, they don't seem so scary; and most importantly, I finally feel alive. More alive than I've ever been, and the blood starts to circulate again throughout my body, without stopping the flow.
At this point, I remain silent to let my dreams, my intuition, my body sensations speak louder, so that all that is important doesn't hide in the basement again and return to becoming a shadow. I remind myself, that all experiences must be nurtured with love from now to my next birthday. Like beautiful gardens.
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Emotional. Beautiful. It is important to not give up on who we are.