Rabarama.

“Write to her” he said.

I don’t think he knew until that moment that I was capable of feeling intimidation. “I can’t! Yet…” I tell him.

It has to MEAN something. If I write her a letter, it must be substantial enough that I am able to connect with her.

I’m sitting on the floor of my friend’s living room gazing at a picture of Rabarama, the artist who has claimed the throne as the object of my admiration since I first experienced her sculptures while walking through Boboli Garden a few weeks ago. He insists with sincerity, “Pero, te senti veramente!….. She is an artist, if she knew how much you feel her work, I’m sure she would want to know.”

I look back at the picture on my laptop. There she stands. Chin-up, arms crossed, covered in all black up to her neck. Face framed in ebony hair, dancing across her eyelids, allowing only a glimpse of eyes that seem to possess all the emotion of the world. The broken tape on Pandora’s box.

There are those women whose strength humbles you. The ones with disobedient eyes and breathtaking ideas. The ones whose power is conveyed as much through their words as through their unspoken disposition. Through their posture and femininity and, yes, through their smiles. She is one of those women… and I’ve never even met her.

I think her message is too phenomenal to just write her a piece of fan mail. “She probably gets it all the time”, I think to myself. I mean… How could people NOT be touched by her message? Mesmerized by her. She speaks of truth. She speaks of freedom. Her eyes, dark and steadfast, are strength embodied. Her words are defiant of anything that does not allow for the true expression of human emotions.

“Il mio lavoro esprime la negazione del libero arbitrio, perché ritengo che il nostro destino sia gia stato scritto.” She says.

She maintains the idea of the negation of free-will throughout her work, believing that our destinies are already written. When we are brought into this world it is not of our own choosing. Nor is our socialization of our own choosing. In that sense, many of our views of the world are preceded. Fed to us from birth like breast milk. If our parents are liberals, more often than not we are brought up with liberal perspectives of the world. It takes a conscious action on behalf of our own commitment to self-discovery to reinvent and re-educate ourselves. It is an act against the natural current of society and takes a silent strength that many people will never know.

My understanding of Rabarama’s meaning when she speaks of a predetermined fate, is that although she acknowledges the effect of the literal pressures of society on shaping a person, she believes also in the influence of some celestial or metaphysical power in bringing to fruition a predetermined fate. However, in my favorite work of hers she redefines herself. She has up until this point insisted that our destinies as human beings are predetermined, but in her work “Ri-Nascita” (Italian for “rebirth”), she moves beyond this idea to the next stage of evolution. She now brings forth the notion of individuals having a choice in their own destiny.

The Ri-Nascita displays the bold image of a woman, left-breast exposed, tearing through a covering that has overtaken her body. This woman as the caption below the sculpture reads, is breaking through a cocoon that has enveloped her. The cloth like cocoon is representative of the expectations and superfluous values that society has throughout our lives engrained, at least somewhat, in us all. The sculpture depicts a figure that has reached a point of consciousness about the existence of space between the person they appear to be and the person they realize they truly are (the person they have been made into and the person they now must become). After grappling with this duality it has made a definitive decision to shed this skin, and reveal its true naked self.

As the woman tears through the shell, she is committing a definitive act. Ripping through metaphorical restraints like a shark through a net, she is shedding all of the expectations and values of a world that has defined her as she no longer chooses to define herself. It is a symbol of freedom. It is a birth of choice. It is a being, more specifically a woman, refusing to be bound. It is a determined statement of and demand for independence of thought and ideology. To the world and more importantly, I presume, to the self. It is, in short, the proactive self- realization that only our wildest dreams are made of.

Love, Me... Free

Ri-Nascita