LARYSA BAUGE

I walk a long distance wearing nothing but my grandmother’s white apron filled with beetroots. The vegetables barely fit in the apron. I stand till exhaustion with the open apron and my arms opened until I cannot hold the beats in it anymore, I drop the apron.

…The burden carried by my past, by generations of women of the country side was transmitted to me. I drop it in a symbolic gesture of breaking off the tradition of enduring the suffering, the attachment to the land and its roots. Just like beetroots, our countryside roots are bloody inside and dirty, earth-smelling outside.

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In the trilogy BEAT THE ROOT I explore the topic of identity through the notion of forcefeeding. We are force-fed with the ideas of who we are, just like children are force fed with the food they hate. I use beetroots as a folkloric element and a symbol of an eastern european country side to which I was told I belong. It is also the food I was force fed.