Acrylic and oil on canvas 30 x 20 cm (11.8 × 7.9 in.)
EUR 3,500About Cecilia Granara
Cecilia Granara (b. 1991 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) is an Italian artist currently living and working in Mexico City. Granara's work has a strong autobiographical dimension, inherited from the feminist movements of the 1970s that established personal narrative as a tool to bring forth new, specifically feminine and transformative subjectivities. Fueled by a determination to deconstruct stereotypes of weakness or desire generally associated with her gender, Granara draws inspiration from her lived experiences to address themes such as sexuality, bodily suffering, and the desire to reclaim the female body. (Words by Camille Brechignac)
Granara received her BA from Central St. Martin’s School of Art and Design, London, and an MFA from both the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Paris, and Hunter College, New York.
About ADIVAC
ADIVAC (Asociación para el Desarrollo Integral de Personas Violadas or Association for the Support of Rape Survivors) is a non-government organization that for over 25 years has provided medical, legal and psychological care to children and adults in Mexico that have experienced sexual violence.
As of April 2024, ADIVAC was supporting 600 people, 350 of whom were children. The majority of their raised funds go to psychological therapy sessions for those who cannot pay the 350 (~$17) pesos fee.
Cecilia Granara on a New Visual Vocabulary for Healing and Trauma
Cecilia Granara was invited to participate in Le Jour De Peintres, a special project conceived for the Musée d'Orsay by Nicolas Gausserand and Thomas Lévy-Lasne. Granara's painting hung alongside Eugène Delaplanche's 19th century sculpture Eve après le péché.
For Artists Support, I chose to donate the painting "Star Ritual".
The proceeds of the sale will go to ADIVAC in Mexico, where the charity reports that “it is estimated that every nine minutes a person is sexually assaulted, which translates to sixty thousand individuals per year in the Federal District”.
We have all sadly been accustomed to a visual culture that focuses on the dramatic power of rape to traumatize victims.
We have, on the other hand, very few visual representations of how to heal such profound wounds.
But, because rape has existed since the beginning of time, cultures around the world have devised rituals for centuries to help and heal women who are victims of rape .
One such ritual particularly struck me as I stumbled across its description in Vicki Noble's book Motherpeace: A Way to the Goddess Through Myth, Art, and Tarot:
“A hollow is made in the earth and a woman bathes there naked in water up to her breasts. Other women cover the surface of the water with flowers and dance around her singing and praying in order to heal her...
In the words of a Navajo ritual chant, which needs to be said aloud slowly:
The world before me is restored in beauty.
The world behind me is restored in beauty.
The world below me is restored in beauty.
The world above me is restored in beauty.
All things around me are restored in beauty.
My voice is restored in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.” (Vicki Noble, Motherpeace: A Way to the Goddess Through Myth, Art, and Tarot, 1983).
In my painting, a woman floats in a body of water. The starlight melts into the water with an almost hallucinogenic quality. The departure point for this painting was in fact the composition from the medieval iconography of the tarot card the Star. Its specific therapeutic context was gleaned from Vicki Noble's book, which reminds us that “Immersion in water is an ancient healing practice, and the power of mineral waters or hot springs cleanses and purifies body and soul. Pain releases and fear lets go, opening the pores to love.”
This two person exhibition brought together ten works made by the renowned artist from Turin, Carol Rama between the mid-1950s and 2000s, and a new body of paintings and site-specific interventions by Granara.
French Curator Camille Brechignac's Words on Cecilia Granara
"[Cecilia Granara's] work, characterized by a representation of what society tends to repress or ignore—bodily fluids, sexual acts, and other "shameful" topics—also aligns with the lineage of feminist surrealism, where the unconscious and mysticism are used to reach new perspectives on identity and the body. In this reflection, Granara adds a contemporary ecological sensitivity tinged with esoteric thought, questioning the connections between the interior of our bodies and the outside world, and striving to represent the invisible links that bind us to living beings."
- Camille Brechignac
