Blank Confinement by Nadia Perrotta

                      Simon Malz CC



Blank Confinement

I drank it halfway
The bottle of barley tea
While a mocking sun
Refused to die
Gray stripes
Of a non-existent summer
It is a deceptive Hope
Delicate lilac jellyfish
float between geometries
Of a window

It is a forced confinement
Of four white walls
Press on the heart
The lightness of an anvil
That squeezes the myocardium
In infinitesimal Stardust
collected in small caskets
Guarded by purple cats from a foreign star

I'm confined
in a puppet game
Theatre circling around
A deafening silence
Of unspoken words
Of cries dying
Between the cracks of a slow heart

Forced confinement
Of an absent
Imposing presence
In the broken silence
From unexpressed winds
Of fiery music
Burning through
Still bleeding wounds
Of pleural tissue broken
by the blossoming
Of white roses’ buds

The light of the table lamp
is reflected through orange transparencies
Of my barley tea
While the unconscious crusher
continues its course
By compressing to the minimum
The thin layers of my chest

Strangled heartbeats save me
Slowing down its course
Whilst I wait for the intangible signal
Of a watchful giant
Holding secretly
in his strong and kind palm
Keys of unwanted freedom
and signs of an honest ending
and I am not given
To recognize patterns
Of unwritten fates
Between four walls
Blank of confinement.

​

Nadia Perrotta is a London and Kent based artist. Nadia works mostly with performance, creative writing and film making. She was born in Italy were she attended The European Institute of Design in Naples and the Intercultural Mediation BA degree Course in Padua University. From 2006 she started exhibiting at national and international level. In 2008 Nadia moved to UK where she completed her Masters degree in Fine Arts with specialism in film making.

In her work, she  incorporates time as well as space, a fictional and at the same time experiential universe that emerges gradually into different layers. Through this process the artist creates juxtapositions of material for memory and projection. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, she absorbs the traditional topics of art and memory into daily practice as a revival of a past tradition filtered by personal experience. Her works are framed through social and political references. A constant and focal problematic is the utopia or the dream of the annulment of a globalised identity and the recognition of one self as individual.

Her latest written work was inspired by her experience connected directly to the COVID 19 pandemic; illness and healing through body mutation, confinement in a digital age, suffocation and the salvation of breath and breathing and the mystical elements around illness and hypoxemia. The works create a set of narratives or new mythologies around the pandemic, health and the ritual practices of science and faith. 

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