The erotic can do without truth. It is semblance, a phenomenon pertaining to the veil.
Byung-chul Han, Saving Beauty
The feeling of helplessness or abandonment is devastating and can penetrate the deepest layers of human existence. Often veiled, it manifests itself in many ways. When it settles into our souls, it takes us into the desert of loneliness, and being surrounded by people does not bring us any comfort.
I have known this feeling from an early age, since my turbulent childhood. It became a companion to me and, in many moments, still is. Helplessness left a mark on my soul and reasserted itself as a way of being in the world. No relationship, either short or long-term, was able to take away the pain it brought me or help start a healing process – quite the contrary. Helplessness or abandonment was experienced again and again through these relationships as the only way life could be lived. It was an unconscious choice, like the ones that shape our romantic relationships, a constant attempt to perpetuate a specific structure, even if a painful one, for lack of knowledge on how to behave differently. It was a plea for love and warmth, a twisted and painful plea, a solitary path. It felt like a comfort zone, bathed in eroticism. It was a constant search that never brought relief; a hurtful and endless quest.
Just when it seemed that this helplessness would stay with me forever, a life-changing wave washed over me, bringing a new universe into myself. I came to understand that to experience life with acceptance means, most of all, to offer oneself and others a shelter, a protection that removes us from this desolate place where we keep battling against life, where nothing and no one can help us. To find this shelter is to rediscover life and realize that we can follow less painful paths. Love exists in many forms.
Today, deep into this shelter, I do my best to deal with this wound through photography. The scar is there and I need the images I get in my photos to remind me of who I was. They remind me of everything that I no longer wish for myself or for the others that inhabit my self.
This work is crucial to my life, whether or not any dramatic effect may be derived from it.
Marcelo Greco
november, 2019
