Relationships of Reciprocity - Ana Vivoda
Using the form of portrait, the installation Relationships of Reciprocity (2020) re-examines the concepts of femininity, the processes of re/construction of a woman’s identity through several family generations. All participants in the project are close members of my family: my grandmother, mother, sister, aunt, daughter, and myself. I brought them together, asked questions, listened to their stories, perceived connections, and wrote out narratives. The talks even touched on the memories of my great-grandmother’s life and her experiences, with which we rounded off more than a century of women’s micro-histories. The lived experiences vary from a woman’s limited social and educational possibilities in a large patriarchal family on an island in the Adriatic from the late 19th century, to different lifestyle possibilities available to a young girl in today’s urban space. I deliberated on the relational character of identity, the formation of gender roles within a family circle, the differences in coping with socioeconomic and other life challenges that resulted in completely opposing life aspirations and fulfilments. The talks are an assembly of fragments of different subjective experiences, often even conflicting perceptions of women among different generations, and the search for women’s codes within the family matrix, the strides into freedoms of identity performance through different personal decisions and choices, through mutual relationships within opposing demands and expectations.