The lifeless birth of my daughter in July 2021 transported me into the worst darkness of my life experience. It’s a loss that finds no parallel.
In those first months, the only activity I could barely concentrate on was knitting crochet. A technique I had learned as a child from my maternal grandmother, and which I had not practiced for decades.

Focusing on the work of my hands, breathing in the rhythm of each stitch, brought me back to the present, to that moment in which I was strongly struggling to be.
Inwards, into the deepest silence of loss.

In January 2022, five months after the departure of my tout-petite, I embarked on a textile artwork project, which emulated a baby-look type of mantle.

This work, this mantle, gradually became the material and symbolic representation of mourning. With each stitch, a memory, a sound, a scent, reappeared.
The mind began to put together, little by little, each of the events, minute by minute, giving shape to this structure of grief.
Silence gave context. Being in the present, in each stitch, was the only possible existence.

Homage.

Between the high mountains and the snow, in the complete solitude of the Alps winter.

This mantle, which saw the weaving of every second of surrender in vulnerability, served as a means to consecrate this process.
Silence.
The surrender to the mystery of what Is, to what belongs to us and to those who are gone.

This process was shared with the local artist Elisabeth Fux-Mattig, with whom we worked together on the experience of delving mourning through art.