A young girl flees her country. In her new home she decides to forget hurt and repress memory. For 80 years, she buries Polish, her childhood language. However, in the last days of her life, she only manages to speak the language that she thought was lost.
My birthday is in the fall, April 24, my happy day painted in earthy and rusty colours. On that same date, signs commemorating the Armenian Genocide dot the walls of my neighbourhood.
I am moved by lives whose time and space are broken, which fall apart from one moment to the next. Scraps of stories wandering through the atrocious uncertainty of the terrain they walk on. The effect of extreme situations on individuals and groups.
My work is a guttural call, a juggling act of facing and fleeing in one same gesture. Centuries of entrails that rush from the throat to the fingers, that vibrate, push, and riot until they find the way, the language, the material to tell.
My pieces address uprooting, memory, and identity. Faces that struggle to say, stay silent, shout, repress or expel. Gestures and scars of bodies ripped from their own history.
The paintings show silhouettes, crowds moving. One, two, three billion six hundred million and more. Numbers like anecdotes, names that no one pronounces anymore. Timeless beings in an eternal search for a path.
I model and paint bodies, cracked floors, blemished skin. I represent them in the manner of recurring guards in the stone, who insist on ancestral cycles.
My walkers are not those of Le Breton. They don’t enjoy the landscape. When walking, they look at their feet and at the back of the person ahead. They are displaced people who multiply in a sordid and inexorable cadence.
“We will give each other courage at every step / Courage, sharing the thirst and the cup / Courage, because even though we have aged / Pain always feels newborn,” says María Elena Walsh in her “Song of Walkers.”
In the silence, a dry murmur is heard, like distant drums. It is their tightened throats. Those of my men and women of stone.
Claudia Hercman
