For someone like me, born in the mid-eighties of last century, a mermaid is a cute and somewhat naive fish-girl who rejects her aquatic world and, in exchange for her voice, receives a pair of legs to move to the Earth’s surface in search of her prince, a darker-haired version of Ken. However, setting aside the exception created by Disney and inspired by Andersen’s fairy tale (spoiler alert: it doesn’t have a happy ending like the Disney version), in literature, mermaids are generally the executioners, never the victims.
Where does the idea of the mermaid, which is so prominent in human history, originate? What drove man (and I use that word advisedly) to imagine a creature half woman half animal (sometimes bird, sometimes fish), who first seduces and enchants the man she meets, only to reveal herself in her true nature as a ruthless and deadly monster? What fear is exorcised by this mythological figure, present in so many eras and cultures? In order to find an answer, it is useful to examine that, in most cases, traditional narratives suggest that sirens use their seductive abilities with an ulterior motive: that of deceiving and killing the unfortunate one who gives in to their flattery. Just to name two examples: in Homer’s Odyssey, the sirens attempt to lure Odysseus’ ship against the rocks with their song; in the novel by Tomasi di Lampedusa that gives the title to this exhibition, Lighea, which was posthumously published in 1958, the protagonist dies at sea, seduced one last time by the siren with whom he had been a lover in his youth.
This is so because for much of history, humanity has been defined by the male, white, and heterosexual perspective. Throughout this period, anything that did not fit into this canon was considered non-human, primarily women. It is from the exclusion from the human category that creatures like mermaids are born. Mermaids are monstrous because they do not submit to the desires of the man who approaches them; on the contrary, they deceive him to satisfy their own pleasure, and then kill him cold-heartedly. To continue the metaphor, women are seen as monstrous, subversive beings, especially when they do not submit to the desires of men and, by extension, to the demands of patriarchy.
Subversive girls populate the abandoned town of Ghibellina Nuova in Elisa Giardina Papa’s (1979, Messina) project “U Scantu:” A Disorderly Tale. The work consists of a visual narrative inspired by some figures from the Sicilian oral tradition, the donne di fora and the inciarmatrici. Ambiguously hovering between genders and species, these women have non-conforming bodies, and for this reason they were persecuted by the Inquisition between the XVI and XVII centuries. In the video, a group of teenage girls runs through the streets of the utopian city that was rebuilt after the 1968 earthquake, riding bicycles that have been customised with sound systems. In the exhibition, Giardina Papa pays tribute to the figures of Sicilian tradition with two glazed ceramic sculptures—one featuring a long white braid emerging from the wall, the other towering on a pedestal—reminding us of one of the several metamorphoses these women were believed to be capable of: the transformation of their hair into the coils of venomous snakes.
Carla Grunauer (1982, Tucumán) paints non-conformist bodies: the Argentine artist outlines hybrid figures where human, animal, plant, and robotic elements merge into one fluid cluster. Ink drips define the contours of what appear to be diaphanous and uncertain-shaped ectoplasms, floating on the surface of the canvas in a space devoid of depth. Similar to the donne di fora, it is impossible to definitively identify and name the nature of the inhabitants of this pale world, and it is for this reason that they seem monstrous. Some have bird heads and human bodies, others seem to grow inside the oblong bellies of pastel-coloured mushrooms, while still others squirm under the weight of disproportionately swollen limbs. They all appear to belong simultaneously to a distant past and to an unknowable future, certainly not to the present moment. Much like the sirens, these deformed and metamorphic creatures are both sensual and monstrous, enticing and repulsive. They exist at the margins of a patriarchal system where the aesthetic canon is defined by the white, able-bodied, heterosexual man.
The works conceived and produced by Andreia Santana (1991, Lisbon) take their stances precisely from such a defined aesthetic standard. Santana looks at the field of archaeology and seeks out those artefacts that have been overlooked by historiographical accounts for being not functional in the transmission of History, which is uniformly Eurocentric and colonialist. This investigation led to the creation of works resembling fossils of animals imprinted on the bottom of the sea and solidified over millennia. However, their iridescent appearance suggests a different, almost alien origin. Glass itself has an ambiguous nature: although it appears solid, it is actually a fluid holding an unstable state. Equally mutable is the identity of these opalescent creatures, eluding the binary categorisations we are accustomed to in naming the world.
Mermaids embody everything that hangs in the balance between two opposites: beautiful and ugly, male and female, seductive and monstrous. Through such an indefinite nature, they challenge, much like the works on display, our way of exploring and understanding the world.
—Marta Papini
at UNA Galleria, Piacenza
until February 10, 2024