Gabrielle Goliath

“I appreciate your note on the centrality of bodily presence and situated knowledge, which is key to the political, poetic, affective and conceptual impetus of the work, as it calls us into a different, more relational aesthetic encounter. It is, however, important to recall that not all “bodies” are equal, or equally “believable”, and do not enter into political representation on commensurate terms. An (anti-black/brown/poor/femme) index of differentially valued life continues to sustain an inequitable regime of representation, one in which white heteronormativity reads (and reads well) whilst the “affectable others” (to cite Denise Ferreira da Silva) do not.”

Art Frame Interview read

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Personal Accounts - Lago di Como

16-channel video & sound installation
2024

Lake Como is beautiful, wealthy people retire there. It’s the north Italian idyll: lakes, mountains, villas, wine, food, lifestyle.

It is also a place of fugitive arrivals and departures – of tentative community, precarious labour and unbelonging. Cutting across differential hierarchies of race, culture, privilege and legal status, patriarchy draws a fault line, marking feminised lives as available to violence and subjecting survivors to (further) social and political invalidation.

Every year, the Como branch of Telefona Donna responds to over 250 new cases of gendered violence and sexual assault, offering psycho-social support, legal counsel and love to women in distress. Shared in this cycle of Personal Accounts are the difficulties, hopes and asserted life practices of nine survivors: artists, writers, cleaners, mothers, entrepreneurs. For some this is home, for others yet another making of it, having arrived in Lombardy (for so many reasons) from Senegal, Morocco, Brazil, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Albania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Connecting this tight Telefona Donna community – across their many differences – is not the ‘common bond’ and social inscription of ‘victimhood’, but the nourishment, affection, solidarity and joy through which they exceed it.

Como is beautiful. Made beautiful in these quotidian offerings of arrival, transition, home-making and repair: in Zohra’s prayers, in Diarra’s bar, in Ecaterina’s photo book, and in the fragile remains of what these personal accounts choose to reveal and withhold.

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Special thanks to Telefono Donna Como, whose careful facilitation and psychosocial support made this work possible.

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