A Happy Oyster Does Not Make a Pearl or Capsule on (a)living | Ana Borges

The oyster, upon sensing the aggression of external elements, isolates them within itself through the segregation of successive layers of nacre. It does not shake them off, does not expel them, does not repel them - it makes them pearls, in a singular metaphor of transmuting pain into sublime beauty.

Thus is configured the experience in the feminine, built from many historical, social, cultural impositions, of body and existence. It is the imposed, and often silent, capacity for resilience and overcoming - like one who learns to breathe underwater - that begins to shape itself as a condition that allows one to remain standing in a world that often calls us to shrink. Thus we learn to weave small capsules of survival: internal places where the essence can finally gain space and voice and embrace occurs, in opposition to the many external places that restrict and impede...

This piece arises from research on the many ways the body finds to exist when there seems to be no space that listens to it, sees it, looks at it even... that feels it.

Vulnerability, stripped of the constant romanticization of excessive productivity as a form of elevation, opens space to simplicity, to contemplation as strength. And perhaps it is in that place that the feminine can finally find and express itself: in union, in equality, and in equity, without the need to rise against the masculine, but rather on a path of hands joined, side by side, and in the name of a common place - a place that welcomes, that embraces, that allows being.