There she was. Naked
In paintings, long blond hair, uncovered breasts. Young,
Innocent, a winsome smile across her lips.
Her name would mean
Source of life, by her side she had a man.
Asking women
if they knew her, men too.

Silence-

Does anyone know what happened in the garden of Eden?
There, was created the first woman, I heard.
Searching for her, still searching for her-

Footsteps, noise,
An alarm.

In the series Fruit of A Silent Land I took the story of Adam and Eve from the Book of Genesis as a point of departure, in order to create a new narrative based on the association of seemingly incoherent, fragmented images that are not tied to the notion of representation. Those images function as random snapshots of the initial story of the first humans, alluding to the biblical events of the Creation, the Temptation and the Expulsion through an allegorical language. Objects that signify Eve’s sin (the apple) or become signifiers of the female nature (the dress), isolated details of the body linked to erotic charge, colors and textures motivating feelings of passion, shame, lust…a visual vocabulary constituting of elements imbued with symbolic meanings that have long been imprinted on the collective unconscious.

Fruit of A Silent Land focuses mainly on the figure of Eve, regarding her as a female archetype that has designated the role assigned to women in Western societies. Through a series of rather cryptic images, left open to interpretations, I intent not to build a narrative that guides the viewer to specific conclusions, but impel him/her to reflect on how such archetypes have contributed to the manner in which the sexed body is perceived today.

Simone de Beauvoir claims “one is not born, but, rather becomes a woman”. If Eve “is guilty of” the Fall of the first humans, and then followed the prevailing feelings of shame and fear, I am interested in the following questions: how has the representation of Eve in the Bible (one of the main didactic sources in the Western world) affected the way the notion of femininity is understood? In which degree do codes of sexual morality and social norms constitute in our times our sexual identity related to notions of pleasure-reproduction-motherhood?