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Alma Tetto

@almatetto

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Transdisciplinarity, embodied & arts-based research
@subtle_practice

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Second attempt (with markups to hide the female form)

Thank you for the outpouring of messages and love in response to my reading. This week is always particularly heavy, and I’ve felt so held by community here by sharing Donald’s words. Your stories about him and expressions of love are creating a powerful net of support—it’s difficult to articulate how deeply needed it is, how necessary its been all along for me.

What many of you see is strength from me, but I want to stress that I also often fall apart. I don’t think these things are separate, in fact, I think my strength derives from and is tied to my going into the depths of the pain. I share this because I want to be clear that what I communicate is not entirely full of light and understanding. The buoyancy and vitality of my life comes from a place of fertile darkness, of deep feeling, of going down into the depths, into the terror, into the black muck, to find roots that can support me as I grow up out of them. I honor my very intimate experience of death D offered me because it has allowed me to embody the full spectrum of life, which also contains the unfathomable pain of loss. That has been his most valuable gift to me.

I say all this to show the dark side of life which I think is so important to embrace, and to allow within ourselves. Let us not push away the absolute terror of being. Instagram especially can be a place of dangerous positivization, and while it’s great (and necessary) to cultivate positivity in a time of such collective division, it’s also important to give ourselves permission to fall apart, to break down.

My own process at times gets ugly. This is very private for me, and yet I think it’s important to share this reality. I sometimes feel paralyzed by the weight of life, by pain and grief, by confusion, by a sense of terrible self-loathing and loneliness and self-imposed exile. It’s the most difficult part of healing (which is to say, living) to welcome these feelings rather than push them away. My strength is inextricably tied to my unbearable human weakness.

Cont below >>

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ZR en casa | A visit with Alma Tetto in her home in Mexico City. She is an artist, writer, and educator and wears the ARI Dress in silk cotton from the latest OWAH Collection. @almatetto

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@almatetto with her daughter Lucia in her sunny home in Mexico City 🌴

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ZR en casa series with @almatetto in the ARI Dress 🌾

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@artforlight auction starting this Thursday, all auction funds raised to goto Clean Air Task Force 🌷

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Old Celine 💕
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#celine #oldceline #marble #marblecountertops #celinestore #paris #celinemarble #interiors #decor #marbledesign

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To create this lyrical and moving investigation of her own grief via the myth of Persephone @almatetto with @jessacarterinstant headed to Stromboli, a volcanic island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the north coast of Sicily.
I was honored when she asked me for a few things to take on her trip. To see our Paros Blouse and Lani Skirt within this beautiful work fills my heart.
From Alma’s companion essay published in issue 6 of @janebythegreyattic ‘When Persephone was taken into the underworld by Hades, she was wandering fields of narcissi along the banks of Lago di Pergusa at Sicily’s navel. Aimless and naïve, she was swept into another realm, a place of darkness, shadow, death. When Demeter, her mother, who held a strong foothold on Mount Olympus as goddess of fertility, finally discovered where her daughter was hidden, the young maiden was granted a chance to return home. Alas, just before seeing her mother, Persephone consumed six pomegranate seeds, fruit of the underworld. This small act secured her fate: she would assume a new role as goddess of the underworld, spending half the year in the dark lower realm in union with Hades, the other half in the upper, earthbound world. Thus, Persephone became the perennial goddess of rebirth.’
Read the full essay ‘On Creative Practice Rooted in Chaos’ and view the film ‘Rebirth’ at https://almatetto.persona.co/rebirth-on-creative-practice

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The erotic leads us toward pleasure, Aphrodite’s domain. [James] Hillman pointed to pleasure as the path toward freeing beauty from the caverns of captivity, from the illusory bondage of soulless commercialism: ‘the road to beauty begins in pleasure, opening the soul’s body to delight, which anyway is what is implied by that sensate word taste.’ We must open to taste, welcome pleasure. This opening takes us deeper within ourselves and, accordingly, into the depths of our world. This is where we reach a place of true connection, an experience of our entanglement with all of life.

Excerpt from my essay Reign of Aphrodite: A renaissance for beauty in apocalypse. Find it in print @Jane.bythegreyattic issue seven and online via link in bio. The photo collage was shot on 35mm around my home in Santa Paula and Lake Casitas, California.

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In a talk delivered at Centro Pecci, the museum of contemporary art at Prato near Florence, the archetypal psychologist James Hillman once said, “We want the world because it is beautiful, its sounds and smells and textures, the sensate presence of the world as body.” Beauty awakens the soul to the mysteries of our world and cosmos, opens our senses to our aliveness. But the aesthetic had long been repressed, Hillman urged. The spirit of time reflected an illness of the soul—that of the repression of beauty. In response to the immense terror of the fires that blazed across Australia last year, I wrote about Hillman’s thought that “below the ecological crisis lies the deeper crisis of love, that our love has left the world” in a piece for @jane.bythegreyattic newest issue. The essay looks at beauty and our neglect of it in daily life and calls for an erotic awakening to our sensual world.

Reign of Aphrodite: A renaissance for beauty in apocalypse can be read in print in @Jane.bythegreyattic issue seven, themed “we’re all alive together” (this beautiful publication I highly recommend for thoughtful reading and viewing during quarantine and otherwise), and online via link in bio. The photo collage was shot on 35mm around my home in Santa Paula and Lake Casitas, California. 〰️
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In our turning away from beauty, we have shunned Aphrodite, the goddess whose radiant presence enlivens everything we find pleasurable. Aphrodite is the embodiment of the aesthetic, beauty made manifest. She is the soul in all things, the anima mundi. The soul is the form of the body, so Aristotle said. Soul, then, is essence in revelation. (Note: “revelation” is the original meaning of apokálupsis in Greek, from which we get our term “apocalypse.”) Nature, the body of Aphrodite, seeks to reveal herself, to show more of her soul essence. The apocalyptic tremblings of the Earth are Aphrodite, the soul of the world, crying out to be heard, like a long-neglected lover, once loved and held sacred then discarded as torn nylon. She is wounded and angry.

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On longing
for time to rewind
to return to us days
when one’s breath moved through me
and one too inhaled parts of me
when we would touch hands
in public spaces
kiss and embrace

We assumed our most simple pleasures
belonged to us always

This is a clip from my film Rebirth, a series of inner visions brought to life by @jessacarterinstant. Here Persephone the maiden is innocently daydreaming on the banks of Lago di Pergusa in the moments before she was suddenly disrupted and dragged into the underworld

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During this time of collective descent, the great unknown stretching out in every direction around us, the overwhelming feeling is a fear for survival. We may be holding fear for our physical wellbeing, our lives, livelihoods, and for those of our loved ones, communities and their businesses, small and large, that cannot be sustained. On a deeper level, though, we are facing a metaphorical death, a psychological dying: our old ways of being cannot hold today; the world as we know it is gone. As we hold the opposites of beholding the wonder of life with the deep realization of our collective fragility, both the beauty and terror of our interconnection, we exist in tension, a pulling apart.

This place between the opposites is an invitation. A threshold. This energy is both destructive and generative. Can we lean into both? What wants to die within ourselves? What lies beneath the surface, wants to expressed? Like a seed cracking out of its shell, a fetus breaking through the womb, a nascent image is being birthed.

Last year I traveled to Sicily with my dear friend @jessacarterinstant to explore images of descent and rebirth, images I was living in my inner world, images that could not be ignored or else I might cease living. We forged a collaboration with chaos, improvising as we explored a portal that opened through the experience of descent. Along the way, through this creative attention and practice, I learned about the relationship between darkness and creation. Through the creative act, I participated in my own rebirth.

The image of rebirth is coming up strong now. I hope to finish and share the film we made with you soon. In the meantime, I just put an essay I wrote last year for the lovely print publication @jane.bythegreyattic online about the experience, link in bio. I’ll be sharing excerpts with you over the next while as well as some ideas for traversing this strange, unfamiliar terrain.

Sending love to all. May you find moments to come home to yourselves during this time. May something new and more beautiful emerge out of this dark unknown.

Image by @jessacarterinstant

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It’s 11.22, and perhaps the mind really is like a sieve, or maybe more like a game of gin, picking up and letting go of things and shapes and colours—memories—as it needs, as it’s required to do. A portal into another way of being, another version of the self, the memory offers sustenance for us to travel both forwards and backwards, altering the current landscape to relive or learn from. But what happens when a memory is worn thin, burnt out from overuse, breaking at the seams and stretching from the centre—vague, compromised, and unrecognisable underneath the static? What happens when a memory is gone? Dissolved from the directory? Is it ever really gone, or does the body always know? Does it get reborn? Is a memory cyclical? Is it seasonal? Is looking at something better than experiencing it?
Perhaps, sometimes, it is.
– from how long is an hour: the memory as a muscle, written for issue six. #janebythegreyattic #janeissuesix #35mm #35mmfilmphotography

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