Working through trauma and self-writing in Leonora Carrington’s Down Below
We are presenting texts published in “Artelogie” – Numéro double spécial 22 (2024): Violencia(s), frontera(s) y sentimiento(s): formas, sentidos y significados de la violencia en nuestra América. You can access all the issue here.
Authors: Ana Carolina Magalhães Salvi
Abstract:
Leonora Carrington has awakened significant interest in feminist and gender studies since the 1970s-1980s, first in Europe, the USA, and Mexico — where she resided for seventy years — and much more recently in Brazil and South America. The artist often drew from biographical elements and alchemic processes in the making of her artwork, being Down Below (both literary account and painting) among the most significant of such endeavours. In it, the artist works on narrating the events that led her to a Spanish sanatorium, her period there and her escape from it, along with the reconfiguring of the experience symbolically, and forging of subjectivity. It is in this sense that this paper analyses it in its double feature of psychoanalytical working through and Foucauldian self-writing, traversed by a feminist mode of subjectivation and practice of freedom.
