“[ENANTIODROMIA] practically always occurs when an extreme one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control.”
“Psychological Types” Jung, Carl (1921)
Enantiodromia
Video performance, 2020
20 min
It is when we reach the extreme, the purest white, that the shadow breaks through.
Wearing my wedding dress, precisely a year after I was supposed to get married, I stood there, alone in the forest and created this video performance. Once representing his power over me, the dress now became a symbol of my disobedience and resistance. As I painted those 25 meters, 25 years of my past life, onto that paper, I remembered my refusal to become the ideal for the man, the pure bride, the neat well-behaved girl, and the conflicts that followed when I begun accepting my shadows.
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“Enantiodromia is typically experienced in conjunction with symp-toms associated with acute neurosis and often foreshadows a rebirth of the personality.”
“The Jung Lexicon” Daryl Sharp (1991)
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Enantiodromia (2020) is a video work combining footage of my childhood and a performance.
Enantiodromia
Installation, 2020
Linen dress, black and red ink
177 x 165 cm
The process of making “Enantiodromia” was the most excruciatingly painful one. I had become stagnant, a mere part-time actor in my narrative, craving to be accepted, loved, cared for, bending to the wills and needs of others. I became obsessed with being sinless, pure white. And from it, my darkness started to spread; the more I tried to suppress it, the more dominant it grew. And in the peak of my light, a month before the ceremony, I couldn’t control it anymore.
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It started with letting go of everything, everyone, to step upon strange deep foreign grounds while relying solely on myself for support. I made many mistakes, tried to escape, to retreat into the comfort of before. But as I write these words, let them be a sign that I am here now. And not despite the discomfort and pain, but because I let it swallow me. I found resurrection in my grief, in being deeply unwell, as it unearthed who I am now, some-one I had buried away since I was a child.
Enantiodromia
Installation, 2020
Meadowsweet, plastic
56 x 20 x 8 cm