STILL BIRTH by Chiara Ernandes
Chiara Ernandes (b. 1989, Italy) was born dead in the summer of 1989. After the intervention of doctors, intubation and cardiac massages, she was brought back to life and was born for a second time five minutes later. As she writes, her life “started from death, by contradiction”. This experience stayed latent in Chiara’s upbringing and took different meanings over time. As a dormant memory, hidden somewhere inside her body, it shaped her way of understanding and navigating the world.
The experiences at the edge of death, also known as NDE (Near Death Experience), are phenomena described by subjects who have regained vital functions after cardiac arrest or a coma. These experiences are also reported by people who, despite having retained vital functions, have run the risk of dying, (following a serious accident, drowning, surgery etc).
Although not everyone develops memories from these experiences, people have often similar recollections: the presence of light, a sense of calmness, moving through a tunnel... These powerful, mystical phenomena often have a permanent impact on their lives.
For Chiara, this episode translated, among other things, in an internal agitation and a deep desire to see and understand herself in all of her fullness. Now, thirty years later, Chiara reflects on her unpredictable journey through life in her monograph “Still Birth”. This complex body of work is a journey that travels into the past and starts with the defiance of a newborn baby and five minutes that expand into a lifetime. In an exercise of reconstruction and memory, Chiara works with family archive, memorabilia, collage and photographs that come together like a puzzle assembling the recollections from her life. “Still Birth" is a raw and poetic search that questions what the body remembers and examines concepts such as memory, the past, death and the narrative power of photography.
“I began to ask my body to attempt to remember where it had been, what language it had spoken while trying to begin its journey. I put myself in the shoes of a speleologist, an astronaut, a diver, a scientist, a researcher. I entered my sidereal craters, in my rocky calcifications, in the fusional dimension that time takes on when it does not exist. I saw myself scattered in the light, I confused myself for a stone, I hid inside my mother from whom there could be no separation.”
“Still Birth” has been edited by YOGURT EDITION and curated by Francesco Rombaldi, it is now available for pre-order. It will be launched on the 17th of July at Charta Festival in Rome.