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| photo_athanasia kanellopoulou |
Persephone is a mythological figure. She is the queen of the underworld.
The myth of her abduction represents
the personification of vegetation, which shoots forth
in spring and withdraws into the earth after harvest.
What are the
roles of Persephone? Persephone has no name till the moment of her abduction.
Before that occurs, she is a daughter, her name is Kore (the maiden) belonging
to her mother. The moment of her rape is the separation from her roots, from
her mother. The mother is lamenting her departure and the earth shrivels. The
pain is enormous, as the mother has to accept that her daughter no longer
belongs to her, but to a man, who gave her to taste the ''seeds of a
pomegranate''
Persephone is a ''liminal'' figure, standing
in a middle stage of a ritual, where she no longer holds her previous status
(identity) but has not yet begun the transition to the status she will hold
when the ritual is over. She stands at a threshold, in between ways of
constructing her identity, time and space. She in a constant battle, in a shift between two
worlds, between light and darkness, heaven and earth, in a shift between the
surviving of the abyss of the soul and the struggling towards the purity and
clarity of light.
Persephone is a grotesque figure. Her feminity is castrated and divided.
She lives a freedom within limits,
within borders. Her body is in
danger, as she is trying to survive and endure the trauma that is socially and
culturally identified with masculinity. Her answer to that is the adaptation of
male characteristics such as embodied power and strength. She is neither a male
nor a female, but a person who has the characteristics of a contemporary human.
Coming from a
country which geographical is a cross point between west and east and having
travelled and lived in more than 40 countries, have came across that female
subjectivity has been built in a series of practices of systematic hypocrisy.
The last 50 years, the role of the woman has changed and nobody can deny that
feminist and sexual revolution has brought positive but also negative things in
the behaviorisms of both sexes. What are the roles of the contemporary
Persephone? Is she a mother, an acclaimed successful
worker/artist/intellectual, a woman who can seduce and be appropriate to the
looks and demands of the 21st century woman?
Female identity is not necessary determined inside the strict framework of time, space or gender. Society creates the roles and these roles are prescribed as ideal or appropriate behavior for a person of that specific sex. The world of media is
creating a woman, a body as a commodity. Researcher and writer Cristy Adair
points out that women’s bodies are distorted by being reduced to commodities by
physical exercises, diets and general management.[1] There
is a great deal of competition, in order to achieve the ‘’perfect’’ body,
improve performance at work, and to wear a mask, which no longer fits to the
reality. In western society we are surrounded with paradoxical messages about
the body. On one hand we need to keep fit, in shape, on the other hand physical
education is generally perceived as less ‘’sophisticated’’ and significant than intellectual work. These restrictions are the impulse behind the
need for artists to create works that reflect upon the female identity.
Persephone reveals the landscape of a human mind, trapped in a body that moves in time and space.
Between Heaven and Earth.
[1] Adair, Christy, Women and Dance: Sylphs and Sirens, The
MacMillan Press Ltd, London 1992, p. 54.
