COMMISSION #13 – SOFIA BORDIN

Sofia Bordin reimagines the features of Juno Caprotina by making a sort of iconographic inversion: usually portrayed with caprine horns and ears, the goddess is in this case embodied by the lower extremity of her body, a hoof, which seems to irrevocably ascribe her to the animal kingdom, and more specifically to the order of ungulates.
On to the other hand, its colour, like the wax of which it is made, evokes the colours and softness of human skin, revealing a potential hybridisation between different species and ways of being. What appears is a creature, timidly revealed, able to combine its protective tools with its most vulnerable parts, its tactile abilities with its defensive ones.
The selection of an anatomical detail such as the hoof is undoubtedly motivated by its wide recognisability and symbolic connotation, but its isolation from the body to which it refers implies a further layer of opacity: in its being partial, the image is actually ambiguous, which lends to a more poetic and in some ways identity-based interpretation.
The artist is inspired by the verses of Hannah Regel, which establish an analogy between the sound produced by the pace of animals such as horses, deer or pigs, and the one produced by female steps. The correspondence between the two subjects, one human and the other animal, not only makes it possible to reflect on the roles and values attributed by the former to the latter, but also to condense into a single image two feelings that both the artist and the poetess consider pre-eminent in the female experience: shame and desire.
The fragmentary nature of the effigy and its detachment from the original pagan iconography lead to interpret it not as proper portrayal, yet as as a relic, the surviving portion of a lost body.
Beyond the obvious reference to the Roman divinity, to the generative and irrepressible power that always accompanies every body possessing goat features (think of Juno, but also of Pan, god of the forests), the work seems to undermine the unity from which it derives, and consequently the very identity it represents: the incompleteness and indistinctness that distinguish it convey the idea of a disintegrated Self, in pieces, that renounces its totality in order to escape the categories that would derive from it.
The operation reflects in some ways the intentions that the scholar Jack Halberstam traces in the use of the technique of collage by artists such as Hannah Höch or Kara Walker: "a promise of transformation, not through a positive production of the image but through its negative destruction, which refuses, however, to give up pleasure".

Sofia Bordin, Clip clop, clip clop, clip clop, 2024, cera 

Text by Giulia Gaibisso

Photo credits: Irene Bruni