One Girl, One Woman, One Endless Bar of Soap
Allison Maria Rodriguez
video installation and live performance
30 minutes, 2008


Artist Statement

“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.  Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud:  this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.  Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried” -Judith  Herman, M.D., Trauma and Recovery.

This is a video installation and performance that functions to explore the psychological space of memory and trauma.  It attempts to generate a visual language for addressing a psychological experience often left unspoken or unacknowledged by the predominant discourse and the private dinner table conversation.  Acts of violence committed upon the body are not simply “washed away” with time, but are embedded within the psyche and become a fundamental component of the subject’s individual understanding of the experience of self-identity.  Attempts to integrate and process the act of violence, the trauma, is represented visually in an identity struggle where the lines between time, place, and subjectivity have been thoroughly blurred.  The violence never disappears in the reality of memory, but it transmutates and distorts, as the subject endeavors to comprehend the incomprehensible.  It is not only the history of an individual, but the history of a society as well.  This piece ultimately exists as an attempt to ignite dialogue about the effects and impact of trauma, and to bring to the foreground an experience unfortunately not uncommon in our society but definitely inadequately recognized, spoken, understood and addressed.

EXHIBITIONS