The naked body of the pregnant mother. The voice of the daughter. Inside-outside. A song to life.

THE MOTHER (fragment of a text by Angelidi, which accompanied the film at its first screenings): The twelfth day of the twelfth month of the year nineteen-eighty was the day before I gave birth to my second child, my son. I. Naked. To come to terms with my fear, I felt the desire to immerse myself into black water, to re-emerge and cuddle my belly. A remembering forgetfulness that to die giving birth is like being born dying.

THE DAUGHTER (fragment from the text by Walldén, which is spoken in the film): I return to my second self. Her smell. Mine. The centre I immerse in. Safety is a smell. And I rest. Calmness. The touch. In my head the buzz stops. In her smell, I rest.

—Antoinetta Angelidi, Rea Walldén

I have been interested in three questions since the beginning: the importance of cinematic writing as juxtaposing dialogue of the elements of heterogeneity, the research of borderlines of cinematic representation, and the incorporation of the creator’s subjectivity in the film. This film addresses the issue of representation of women’s bodies in modern and contemporary art history: gender as construction and not as destiny. It is structured on two axes: on the one hand, the body representations and the body of representation; on the other, writing in situation and not on situations. It is composed as a synchronic and diachronic synthesis and subversion of images and sounds. The inversion of codes, as well as their juxtaposition, constitute the film’s central creative strategies and, therefore, the key for its interpretation. A succession of indirect references and games, subversively comment on aesthetic theories and specific artworks. Music is produced by the repetitive transformations of the sound of speech. The inversions of image and sound function narratively, reinscribing women’s bodies. —Antoinetta Angelidi