The genesis of this work has been quite uncommon, a true mystical experience. a sort of “channelling”, I would describe it. At the Castle of Santa Severa, overlooking the Tyrrhenian sea, my works have appeared (in the true meaning of the word) in one single day, emerging on long stele of rice paper – a fragile, yet robust foundation. As if they where araising from the soil, awakening from those dungeons, waiting to be seen.

A pantheon of female divinities – a sisterhood, quoting Maria Zambrano – came to light. Women who shaped through their invocations the sacred area of Pyrgi. Chthonic figures of syncretic cults: Artemis, Aphrodite, Eileithyia, Eos, Astarte, Persephone, Kore, Demeter and, above all, Leucothea: the white sea goddess invoked by sailors and castaways – the goddess who dances and floats on seafoam. I later discovered that, through centuries, ancient cults were celebrated right where the Castle was built. According to different legends the contact of mortal body with sea waters transforms the protagonist in a goddess. l was struck by the aesthetic and symbolic affinity between Leucothea and the white female figure in my White video, which I created two years before: both figures dance on seafoam in an a circular and diachronic time: both as salvific figures. 

Barbara Duran