[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_22

Walk Through Walls, a memoir by Marina Abramovic,2016

I was on the phone with a friend a while ago, discussing my move to England and my experience at the Centre for Women’s Studies. I told him that here I hoped to find a place where - finally - I could feel at ease but that it wasn't the case; I didn't feel like I belonged, not even here. He replied that I would never feel comfortable anywhere if I couldn't be comfortable with myself first: “You can't even look at yourself in the mirror,” he told me. His sentence referred to the fact that I don't like being looked at, that seeing my reflection bothers me, and that I try never to appear in photographs. It's not a body image problem: I don't see myself as ugly; I just don't want to see myself. I find my presence annoying. “If you grow up with people who constantly tell you you are a burden, you believe it.” His words touched me deeply.

I started thinking about all the times I ventured into new projects and new challenges, raising the difficulty bar more and more, and I realized that I wasn't doing it just to test myself but also because I hoped that, by overcoming the challenges, I would finally be satisfied with myself. I would feel at ease among people. But it never happens. I'm never happy with myself and never feel like I am in the right place. Not even now that I have challenged my fears and managed to learn English to have an experience abroad for the first time, doing what I want to do. I perceive my person as an encumbrance, whether in a photograph or a room, alone or with friends. I am in excess; my whole person is in excess, not just my body. It is a condition that erases achievements and always makes me feel wrong just because I’m there. I realized that I’ve been educated to disappear. I wondered how you could master your own life if you aren't even capable of living in your own body if you feel guilty even occupying a chair.

A few days after the phone call, I attended a seminar on performance art, and the homework involved creating a performance. I laughed out of frustration: I had no idea what to do and was also a little prejudiced towards this type of medium. I started watching various performances online, looking for ideas, and I thought there was much masochism in many of those I’d scrolled through. I realized that this was the same comment that Yugoslav criticism made about Marina Abramovic's work, in her book Abramovic, reports: “What I was doing had nothing to do with art, they wrote. I was nothing but an exhibitionist and a masochist, they said. I belonged in a mental hospital, they claimed”. But I also remembered how she describes her work: a process of liberation, an embodiment of fears.

So I asked myself: how can I embody impostor syndrome?

To challenge the impostor to look at herself straight in the eyes!

So, inspired by Marina Abramovic’s performance “The Artist is Present,” I sat on a chair and put a mirror in front of me. I looked into my eyes for twenty minutes. I repeated the act three times. I discovered that I found it very difficult to sustain my gaze the first time I made it. And that forcing me to look at myself causes me not only annoyance but also a form of pain (I cried). I noticed that the suffering disappeared by repeating it, and somehow, I got used to my look, face, and body. The second time I did the exercise, I was so used to my reflection that my gaze abstracted it when I looked at it intensely. I saw only my eyes in the mirror, clear and fixed; the rest was a blur without contours.

The third time I noticed my face, all the asymmetries I have, how time has hardened my features, how unhappy my expression was. Unlike the previous two times, the last one, I could think. I thought of myself, and I did it with kindness. After these five minutes of observation and thoughts, nothing. For the last ten minutes, I haven't thought about anything or seen anything. I simply was. What I experienced in this performance is vulnerability as a space of cohabitation through a sort of “catharsis” created by the repetition. Quoting the dancer Boyzie Cekwana: “Repetitive actions could be a form of resistance—an insistent replay and magnification of simple actions of performing acts already seen, repeatedly, in a revolt against erasure or forgetting.” Even when the erasure or forgetting concerns you.