Toeti Heraty (2001)

 The Via Dolorosa

Toeti Heraty

Two books are lying on the table. The third book is on the making about the sculptur Dolorosa Sinaga and her works of art. How these twpo other books relate to Dolorosa? The one is a thriller, a New York best seller, the other is a four-teen-year compilation of trans Atlantic love letters.

A serial killer who leaves his victims – women raped and strangled – for the medical examiner, a women who is using the latest advances in forensic research and almost became a victim too. Dolorosa is in a way killer too. Forms alive with imaginationalive into dead bodies in whatever material, bronze or copper. But to be able to analyze a corpse and then create identity and intent of the killer. Dolorosa is like the forensic researcher. She becomes simultaneously killer and examiner. Killing the resistance of the material to change its substance to become significant form.

The love letters are written by Simone de Beauvoir to Nelson Algren, an American writer almost forgotten except for his scenario for a film with Frank Sinatra “The Man With the Golden Arm”. Simone appearingvery loving, very passionate persuading him to visit her Parisian Intellectual life with  Jean-Paul Sarte, Albert Camus and Arthur Koestler.

Was it possible to share a world of intimacy but to remain apart maintaining a “trans Atlantic amour”? The letters are written in period of fourteen years time but the bodies are staying apart, Simone in Paris, Nelson in Chicago. In her letters she refers to embraces, lips, hands, arms and the “rest”.

Dolorosa would become impatient looking for a body, while tracing the kaleidoscope of emotions through three hundred and four letters. Creating bodies, emerging from primeval emotion and not the other way around, especially Dolorosa would in vain look for the body.

Finally the trans Atlantic amour flounders because bodies are far apart, ignoring the dictum of modern philosophy “I think, therefore I exist” which id only good enough for philosopher. We, as lover exist through our bodies we grow into the depth of emotion and are liberated through recognition. Even for lovers the bodies have to be discovered while soul and spirit are serious distractions, to pull attention away from the body.

It is paradoxical that finally women will create female bodies which strange enough belonging to men’s territory of patriarchal interpretation. It was patriarchy that keep female bodies within the boundaries of the beauty myth, of virgin, purity, fertility, and the temptation of the flesh: a female body is enemy territory to be occupied, penetrated, ploughed for fertility and posterity sake. If finally women come to know and recreate their own bodies it is a moment which has been awaited for a long long time, while women’s knowledge of female bodies was formerly limited to knowledge through abortion and midwifery.

Dolorosa’s fermale bodies emerge primarily through a geography of emotion, grief, happiness, ecstasy and solidarity. Women existing through bodily depiction keeping close to the earth roots are now trying to soar away through movement of intent and imagination. Her sculpture became substance to be reckoned with in a new metaphysics of freedom and recreation. Instead of taken a rib out of Adam’s body, women’s existence is created within wider horizons.

She has broken the long silence women now speaking for themselves, through mute forms subduing silent materiality into significant, that is what we owe to Dolo. A long painful and mute suffering the via Dolorosa is now left behind: through Dolorosa’s art the I can speak.  

Budapest, 6 September 2001

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