The Giant

Ami Barak: In some of your drawings a giant appears; his presence immediately makes me think of fairy tales and of what I read as a child, and particularly of Brobdingnag, the city of giants that Gulliver visited during one of his extraordinary journeys described by Swift. There we know that we are dealing with a philosophical tale about an enormous being, which can be understood in several ways: we might think that you feel small when facing certain situations, but that when confronting interior conflicts, you call on someone who has the power to help you. There must be a very solid reason to reverse expectations, to find one’s own measure and match it to that of one’s peers. In your case I have the impression that the giant helps you to have the courage, energy and strength to rise to situations involving conflict and problems.

Ana Adam: My giant certainly helps (me), he could be a guide in a new world. Encountering him helps me recruit my strength, which is seemingly only physical in nature. His being large is only a graphic way of representing his positive qualities. Thus, the reference to the inhabitants of Brobdingnag is an opposite one. But also to Dahl’s BFG. In Romania, as everywhere in the world, there are stories and legends about supersized human beings. I know two villages where there are still locals to be found who maintain that they have seen their skeletons. It is extraordinary, in these cases, that the giants are regarded as being our ancestors. It is orientating for someone to believe that they have powerful progenitors. I was once in the region of the elbow of the Carpathians, and as I stood in the grass on the brow of a hill and contemplated towards the valley and the uplands around me, I found myself able to imagine that being a giant was a possibility.

Once I became more conscious of femininity, I naturally went through new experiences in relation to masculinity, especially my interior masculinity. The giant in the drawings is the animus. The constraints imposed on femininity in patriarchal society has affected masculinity in equal measure, and the consequence has been the creation of some circles of wounds or of healing, it depends how we look at them. Recovering the one (femininity) takes place simultaneously with the recovering of the other. Then, the two of them meet on a different level, the animus and the anima become curious about the Other that they have before them and that they may not have encountered before. Between them is created a given space which they explore. The giant in these drawings encounters femininity and they celebrate. They test each other out, they marvel at each other, they love each other, laugh, learn to live together, create spaces. And they play the game of changing their dimensions as many times as they wish.

The Witch

Ami Barak: Another recurring character is the witch. We know that historically speaking the witch is a maleficent character, a legend fostered by the Church and the dominant patriarchal society. The classic image of the diabolical witch is either that of a wrinkled crone or that of a seductive young woman. For Freud, the witch is a negative representation of the mother, while in the Romantic period the witch becomes a positive character, akin to the good fairies. This character chooses to live on the margins of society and consequently at one remove from the Church. She thus appears as innovative, feminist and appalled by her assigned position in society. Initially occupying the position of a marginalized woman, the target of people’s hatred, the witch is someone who, through her power and her freedom, terrifies even as she seduces. A proto-feminist figure whose sexuality was frequently perceived as excessively liberal, the witch became a symbol of the woman who rebels against authority, someone impossible to constrain within a rigid system. Today, the witch is feminist, political, and often queer. Why has she evolved in this way? In your work, the witch is primarily linked with magic and is someone who can reverse the faith.

Ana Adam: The witch in my drawings is personal power that has been inhibited, suppressed, hidden and often forgotten even by the woman/man in whom it resides. In a patriarchal atmosphere, femininity has naturally been fractured, but some parts of it have become archetypes. The Judeo-Christian tradition split it into two major antagonistic roles: the virtuous mother and the prostitute. The mother was accepted, while the vamp was secretly desired, and other parts were hidden in dark corners of the collective subconscious, where they have continued to suffer. We can say that the witch is queer, that is, odd, since she situates herself outside the usual norms of society. She is without shame, since she refuses to burden herself with secrets; this is something we could learn from her. She thus evolved during her journey towards being seen and accepted. Femininity reconstituted from the Mother and the Seductress and the Proscribed Woman and the Free Woman and the Muse and the Huntress and the Nourisher and all the other feminine roles brought together in one place is natural understanding that becomes magic. Once recognized, she can gather healing plants and magic potions, she can show her understanding openly, she can experience a shared love, she can create what has not existed up to now, but above all she can weave her own destiny. She can alter her anatomy during the creative process so that she can have exactly the number of fingers she needs to work with the threads of life. She can appear as a wrinkled old woman or as an innocent young girl or in any other form. The female witch, as an archetype in full possession of its rights, can be expected to contribute to life’s fulfilment. She has begun to break the taboo against knowing one’s own identity and she invites us to follow her example.

I want these drawings to be a tribute to all the women who have been marginalized for their desire to live out their femininity and their powers of creation. At times, they have needed to fight for this or have lost their lives for it.

The Mushrooms

Ami Barak: When I looked at your mushrooms I was reminded that Freud analyzed foraging for mushrooms as a renewing of eroticism and a kind of rebirth of sexual life. This quest for mushrooms, for their mysteries and their power, is a true passion that becomes an initiatory search for knowledge. This intelligible symbolism transfigures us at a profound level, for it gives the play of the senses a direct connection with the world.

I have discovered that there are many symbols linked with mushrooms, but what caught my attention the most was that for some Bantu peoples in the Congo the mushroom is a symbol for the soul. All these beliefs have in common the fact that they make the mushroom the symbol of life regenerated through fermentation, organic decomposition, that is, death. Some ancient texts regard mushrooms as a love potion.

Regarding the shape of some mushrooms, one might draw the conclusion that they are a phallic symbol, something that does not strike me as unjustified. I have even learned that the imagined mushroom is twice as frequently found in women’s dreams than in those of men. This brings us back ineluctably to two colors: red and white. Ephemeral, seductive and dangerous, the mushroom also lends itself, by its very nature, to the representation of contradictory impulses. The way you deal with mushrooms by using sewn threads is an original approach which leads us a significant part of the way towards self-knowledge. This empirical and infinitely subtle method involves a phenomenological approach to the ancestral spirit of woods and plants. This approach rings out in your drawings like a summons, like a litany that has the power to tame the magic part within us.

Ana Adam: The magic part within us must be afforded trust and liberty. Then our life will be filled with new creations. As for sewing as a method of drawing, my view now is that the way the movements are repeated make it similar to a litany or mantra: a length of thread, a piercing of the material, a thought, a feeling, another piercing action, the thread meets another thread. I had the opportunity to practice, taking responsibility for what I put into a drawing and so I came to understand the story of Penelope. I believe she wove and unwove her own story. Anyone who works with lines is the friend of the invisible and invites us to structure our personal story.

I have my own mythologies; the mushroom is a part of them and is one of my allies. Since its family is a very extensive one, I have met stories involving it that are unpleasant, or extraordinary, but I have always experienced it as a guide. One of my earliest ideas about existence was that there is a mushroom under whose cap I could always find a place of safety. Later I learned that other children too have had the same feeling and that enormous fossilized mushrooms have been discovered. I like to think that what the spirit of the mushroom said to Terence McKenna is true: that it travelled through the cosmos to our Earth to guide us.

I admire the ability of many fungi to make alliances with plants to benefit all species.

I am grateful to the healer Maria Sabina for her work with sacred mushrooms and for permitting this therapy to become known outside Mexico.

The woman with multiple breasts and other births

Ami Barak: The goddess Artemis of Ephesus is a fertility goddess who nurtures the whole of humanity thanks to her numerous breasts. But I doubt whether it was this symbolic meaning that led you to this intriguing female character with her double breasts. Why did you want to double the stakes? Your double breasts are like Chinese calligraphy and remind me of the flourishes of a signature. They strike me as akin to those of Louise Bourgeois, because I feel they are a challenge to rational identity, to a socio-cultural norm, to the masculine/feminine dichotomy, and remind us in a critical way that the social relations between the sexes are a power relationship.

I also observe in your drawings some birth scenes in which the roles are reversed. The man is the one who gives birth. You quite possibly know that maieutic, named after the mythological character Maia, who oversaw births, is the Socratic branch of Greek philosophy and consists of helping people’s minds give birth to what they know.

Is it in order to challenge doubts and make anxieties bearable that you invent personal mythologies that nevertheless have a collective resonance?

Ana Adam: The reason I doubled or trebled the “stakes“ was that the empowered woman can multiply her breasts whenever she wants to, depending on her need to nurture her creation and to interact. It is certainly a symbolic mode of expression. Drawing breasts in this way, via a deliberate stroke of the brush, can be the daily nourishment for creation and interaction. I understand the feminine-masculine relationship as a power relationship, but in a different way that is the opposite of the current mentality. Power can be however it is, the society blamed both, the power and the woman because it was afraid. Without them, we cannot be creative, thus human. In these drawings, I give expression to my understanding of the feminine-masculine relationship after both sexes have recovered their power and can exercise it in complementing and supporting one another, as each contributes to the space between them. There is no longer any need for us to manipulate each other, we can collaborate.

Yes, in my drawings the human is the one who gives birth, not specifically the woman or the man, precisely because they can do so. The human gives birth to ideas, creates, invents, is reborn and is born.

Near-death experiences bring with them new understandings of life, a starting-over-again with the same body. In extremis there can be a mystical birth tht does not involve a mother and father.

Christina and Stanislav Grof have studied in a systematic and thorough way how birth and the time before it have an enormous influence on our lives. There are breathing techniques, the holotropic one or the „conscious rebirthing” one for example, that can take us back to the perinatal period and make it possible for us to relive our own birth, with an amazing opportunity to relate to it differently from the first time, in a healing way.

Doctors such as Michel Odent and Frederick Leboyer have given us a new understanding of birth as process and of those involved in it, the mother, the baby, and the father too, and have succeeded in separating them from the anxiety that Freud described and guiding them to enjoyment and ecstasy.

It is a gift of the human condition that we should be Birth givers.