A cofanetto is a small casket that was used as a vanity case for the toilet articles and personal treasures of Venetian Renaissance women. The cofanetto with the scrigno, a strong box used to store money, were kept locked in a woman’s bedchamber. Both boxes were embellished with fashionable allegories of the period evocative of beauty.
Recently, I saw a
cofanetto in an exhibition of Venetian art influenced by Islamic tradition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Like in the late sixteenth century Venice, Islamic influence is changing Europe and North America today. In the West we struggle with the acceptance of hijab and similar female practices of gender, beauty and modesty. The feminine and beautiful are so often entrenched cultural strongholds, sites of power and domination. A cofanetto capable of holding dissimilar views from many traditions intrigued me. By the appreciating of many traditions, can a woman escape the expectations and limitations of one? Who was the woman that opened the box in the privacy of her room, long before it was encased in a museum? What items did she keep inside to prepare herself for the outside world? How did she see herself and her world?
My wondering made me ask, if I could answer these questions even for myself about my own experiences, sensibility and time. What is needed to prepare to go outside? And how is the ambiguous boundary between inside and outside drawn? I invite you to open this cofanetto. The box and the hand-drawn animation you will discover within is a journey between in and out, cultural, psychological, political, as well as physical.
When I try to apprehend inside and out, I begin with my body. Simone de Beauvoir writes in
Second Sex. “For, the body being the instrument of our grasp upon the world, the world is bound to seem a very different thing when apprehended in one manner or another.” As both a daughter and a mother, looking in, is like pulling out threads that weave together all life. How does one separate the site of our beginnings from our mothers’ bodies or our bodies from the conception of our children? At what minute do children become separate, become themselves? Sometimes in the flow of life all that defines me, as a figure separated from the ground, is the knot of fear and resistance to life’s changes in my stomach.
If I try to empty myself of all the images of women that I have seen, I can’t make sense of the void. If the frames were empty like the ones on this cofanetto, who would I be? I have tried on many images, and mostly what I know of myself is the way they don’t fit. Mirrors, too, say little of whom one is, reflecting just a hint of oneself as the other.
Was there a clearer truth before we had eyes to see, when we were connected in the womb, inside of another? I imagine or can faintly remember the warmth of pulsing light and color. A place not quite remembered or perhaps conjured from our emptiness, where time returns us. Like a window without a wall, I cannot tell if I am looking in or looking out of this place. The traces of our searching for what is inside and our efforts to reach beyond ourselves are all we know of it. Beauty is then the fearlessness of our search, both fierce and graceful, to be ourselves and to forget ourselves.
