Cotton Candy by Marta Viola

Cotton Candy was born long before I knew it.
I wanted to give voice to something that was quietly in motion.
Every time I started thinking about the experience of the body, I touched hypersensitive spots and I could not go further.
So I opened myself to meet and dialogue with other women.
I wanted to be able to understand and find myself into others’ narratives, beyond my personal experience.
The body thrives through relationships.
I wondered about “defective” and “unproductive” and the solicitations to be necessarily performing. I couldn’t understand why we don’t feel good in a changing body, despite being a natural process.
Physical change is an inevitable event of time, however it can also happen drastically. This is the point, the emotional process can be too much sometimes. If we were used to thinking and defining our bodily identity more closely to reality, the feeling of detachment from the so-called normality would perhaps be different. But this concept of reality cannot be achieved until discourses around the multi facets of the female identity are not in place.
The perspective on a woman’s body is always filtered by the male gaze to the point of becoming the dominant socio-cultural thought.
The discomfort for a no longer functional body arises from the realization of environmental expectations.
What does a body actually want for itself, other than what it should want? Thus a narration of imposing pre-established meanings emerges even in those who think they are free from such constrains, leading to important repercussions.
I hope my visual research generates a process of liberation and an inception of different self definitions.