Katarina Alamat Kusijanović & Yvonne Andreini: The Voices We Inherit

Katarina Alamat Kusijanović & Yvonne Andreini: The Voices We Inherit For centuries women were often the custodians and carriers of the oral tradition that kept alive the cultural and spiritual inheritance, indeed, the very identity of the community. Traditionally bound to hearth and home where they cared for household chores and the upbringing of children, women transmitted in their stories and lore the knowledge and moral values of the given society, taking on the role of emotional collector and creator of further stories, lore and legends, poems, beliefs, myths and sayings. Up to the modern age they would often have no access to formal education. This newly created parallel knowledge system was the guiding thread of the manner of life and conduct that they transmitted from generation to generation. The further recipients of this information, carefully packaged in terms of compunction, concern and familial love, psychologically shaped individuals whose behaviour would not infrequently be moulded by the fear of certain admonitions from sayings or traditions about those unfortunates who had sinned against social standards. This individual would internalise the voice, and it would become a moral principle, a conscious or unconscious powerful psychological instrument for the transmission of the thinking and experience of the previous generations and tended to determine the deeds and actions of his or her life. Most important is the moment in which we become aware of these inherited outlines, these ropes that guide us like ships to safe harbour and seemingly safe choices. The act of becoming aware often comes in adulthood and maturity when we become aware of the ties that bind us and control us, when they start to pinch and strangle us, inhibit our actions in our relationships with others and totally enslave our spirits. Artist Katarina Alamat Kusijanović places before us a narration of the origin of these bonds that often come into life benignly by the back door. She calls them well-intentioned gifts, manifesting them in small-sized pictures (21 x 14 cm) that look indeed like carefully wrapped presents. Such presents often come from those we love best, from our mothers and grandmothers, from those who have had an important hand in our upbringing during our childhood. And for this very reason it is hard to recognise them as the recurrent destructive pattern of our development coming as they do with good intentions from people close to us. Implicit in these gifts are all the sayings, the admonishments and the terrors and pains that we lug behind us in our lifetime like an invisible suitcase. Alamat Kusijanović spent her childhood summers on Kalamota Island, three kilometres away from her native Dubrovnik. There she was steeped in the oral tradition that formed her child’s mind. About going out in the afternoon, when the bogeywoman from around the corner came to pick up children, about the black cat that presaged misfortune, about respecting the rules for the sake of going to heaven, for there went those who were good and wished everyone good day and never said I won’t. 1 Engineering a sense of fear in children out of concern for their safety is actually also a mechanism for the control of their conduct, the recurrent pattern of which is unconsciously manifested in the lives of the adults, where the traces of them are visible. Alamat Kusijanović says: “Implicit in almost all the gifts we get from loved ones is a mode of submission or deference so that we should meet expectations and obtain love. Sometimes this love is withheld, sometimes we withhold it from ourselves out of uncertainty and the want of confidence in ourselves. The desire to be the best we can often leads us to renunciation and complaisance.” This deference occurs ceaselessly in our lives, the individual falling under the pressure of the rope, understanding the danger of its strength. The packets she creates are thus diverse. Some are packed up neatly and attentively, some are coming apart, sometimes are even burst open, and some lastingly sealed in chastity, the motif of lace and curtains that she uses mostly iconographically related to a house or household into which brides enter innocent. The knots of ropes on the larger pieces, the beginnings of which are sometimes hard to find, the way of untying them symbolizing our interior discipline. They are often hidden by our conscious and unconscious behaviour patterns as far as the point at which they break and we attain awareness, when, in conversation, therapy or meditation we can understand and get down to their sources and causes, slowly getting free of the given ropes. But hiding them and letting them penetrate deeply like veins in the body, we do not always succeed in freeing ourselves – only through them wearing away, or the passage of time when the ropes snap or come untied, do we reach the moment of change. Alamat Kusijanović reaches the conclusion that "packages that remain permanently wrapped often lead to discontent, sadness, depression, anxiety, and sometimes to severe states of amnesia”. Alamat Kusijanović puts into her new series of works her own experience, with the actual work on these mentally demanding works requiring actually hard physical labour. During this process, the painter puts on numerous layers of chalk that involves a long period of boiling, sieving and preparing the chalk to put on the support in multiple layers. All these applications make the painting heavier, just like those experiences in life that make us heavy, torpid and unready for the great changes that we need. Liberation from the fetters is the theme of a series of works in ink an acrylic on canvas by an Italian painter who resides in Berlin, Yvonne Andreini. The collaboration between these two artists started while they were socialising and working together during an IN/SU/LA residency on the Italian island of Ventotene in 2024 that grew into a deep friendship and a shared narrative thread