Text by Orsola Vannocci Bonsi *
In 1948 Eugenio Montale wrote a mesmerizing, voluptuous and sinuous poem, “l’Anguilla” (the eel), which guides the fortunate reader, or listener, through the arduous path of the animal, the journey undertaken to reproduce, to continue Life, as a metaphor of the sweet, sensual and lively resistance of the feminine. The eel slips through the mud, the ooze, a slimy and humid dimension to find its fulfillment, in its exquisitely feminine struggle, following its vital instinct.
Humidity is the same leitmotif tying the pieces that Mia Dudek offers to this - “wombish” - space, a vault. Humidity as the ideal condition for the formation of mushrooms, their growth and proliferation, as the ones portrayed in the series “Fruiting Bodies”: organisms that, as the eel, creep, slip, enter, being extremely fertile and prolific. Dudek caught these entities as something erotic and inviting, yet simple, as with a sensually sweet glance at these beings, their sprouting is destructive, they could damage what they inhabit, but at the same time they are bringers of life.
The same destructive force is metaphorized by the polyurethane foam, with its change of state - from liquid, therefore creeping and penetrating, to solid, thus large, occupying, spacious - takes place in the site-specific intervention “Stroke V”. Here, the foam seizes the window of the space, defeating it, as a fungus, a prolific parasitic animal which started to grow on it, occupying part of it but still leaving a space to be able to see what happens inside. Somehow uncomfortable, yet inviting - thanks perhaps also to the candyish reassuring color and visual consistency of the foam - there is a way to peek inside, a peekaboo as a revealer to a somehow private, domestic dimension. The domesticity is indeed found in the bathtub located in the space, the private, intimate place par excellence and obviously wet and humid, which inevitably impregnates the room with childhood memories and maternal warmth. “Bath” is like a cocoon, but at the same time a lieu of wonder, as if someone just left this domestic scene to expand her/himself elsewhere, leaving silicon traces of their passages on the floor - “Skinscapes”.
It is curious to think that this space in its not so remote past was a fountain, a fountain that today lies dry, where the dimension of the wet returns through the superficial but aquatic consistency of the moist created by the artist. “Feelers” indeed echoes T.S. Eliot’s ventral longing in his “The Wasteland”. A land that is waste since its arid and abandoned, devastated - in this case by a war (the First World War) or rather, an era, which is the first half of the twentieth century - where the only hope of rebirth lies precisely in the expectation of a “(…) Damp gust - Bringing rain”. A wet and dirty rain, to deeply shake and demolish a moldy land, in order to overturn a situation of human free fall.
The force expressed by Mia Dudek's works is devastating and at the same time gentle and maternal, delicate, but active and resistant, interconnected - like the spores of a mushroom. The artist therefore transcends the sacred idea of a possible domestic divine feminine, which is already in itself opposed to the patriarchal concept of sacredness. Instead of being high and revered hers is much more linked to the earthly soil, moving and growing from below, like the spilled silicon, genderless like the mushrooms, even closer to a terrestrial carnality, like Montale’s eel. A feminine which for sure is indeed divine, but not sublimated, rather real and tangible and above all tactile: Humid.
* Text written on the occasion of “Fillers” by Mia Dudek at Spazio Volta, Bergamo (Dec 2021 – Feb 2022)
