Birthmark
Press text

There is a primordial, carnal dimension in the idea of “home” that Isa Rus reveals. A home that is a warm body, a mother’s breast, a home that is, in fact, a mother. Birthmark, the title of her personal exhibition, the sixth in our Homecoming cycle, evokes the idea of the birthmark in more than the literal sense of the word – the mark that some believe is caused on the infant’s body by the failure to satisfy a pregnant woman’s craving – but alluding to the mark on the mother’s soul, the profound transformation that derives from motherhood. “This project”, says the Spanish photographer, “reflects a blend of personal and universal experience, capturing the crude and intimate moments of maternity and the profound connections that we form with our surroundings and with our loved ones”.

The mother’s body, the field of an eternal silent battle, transformed by pregnancy, inhabited by the newborn, pervaded by expectations and judgments, is expressed in Rus’s photographs in a dimension of total freedom and connection with nature. It is immersed in nature, and merges with the landscape. Viewed in an intergenerational perspective, imbued with the idea of the Homeland (Rus migrated from Spain to Germany, and her work also reveals the nostalgia typical of the migrant’s condition), interwoven with the elements of nature, the idea of maternity captured by the photographer breaks away from any stereotype and expresses itself beyond any visual cliché or cultural superstructure.

Her work puts us directly in the trajectory of the mother gaze, a visual study that attempts to represent motherhood in its most authentic essence, in contrast with the flat iconic dimension, revealing the chiaroscuro aspects and contradictions. Isa Rus looks at mothers to see what she herself has become in the metamorphosis of having a child, and this reflection has the poetic and political sound of a paean to the proud ownership of her identity, her body, her condition and her personal story. From the day of the opening it will also be possible to consult the catalog of available works by Isa Rus on the Forma Edizioni website www.formaedizioni.it.