Part 1

The aria is the beginning. The aria is the end. The aria sung at the start is the aria lived at the end. Thirteen years is the material. Material that burns.

Dido is Alina. Alina is Dido. Dido builds a pyre. A pyre of gifts. A pyre of the sword. A pyre of the bed. The bed that was a place that became an altar that becomes earth.

Aeneas departs. Aeneas builds Rome. Rome of stone and bronze. Bronze is not skin. Skin remembers. Bronze forgets. Aeneas conquers territory. Dido becomes territory.

Burning. Not only Dido burns. The monk burns at the crossroads. The student burns in the square. The body burns on the pyre. The body is a throat. The throat is in flames. The word in the throat. The word that falls on deaf ears. The word becomes lament. Lament that settles into the earth.

Fabric is skin. Skin is a map. The map is land. Land has no borders. Borders belong to Rome.

Posture of the earth. It lies like a body. A body that is weary. Weary of the vertical. The vertical of Rome. The pedestal for the hero. The hero is gone. Dido remains. The horizontal of the earth. Earth that receives. Receives and transforms. Transforms ash into soil. Soil for the root.

I will lay me in the earth. The earth of another world. A world after Aeneas. A world after Rome. A world of dust and memory. Memory that is a seam. A seam that joins. Joins Dido and the monk. Alina and the student. Fabric and earth.

This is earth. This is a body. This is a body that remembers. Remembers how to lie down. To lie down in order to grow. To grow and burn again.

Part 2

Alina Brovina's exhibition is a contemporary reading of the myth of Dido and Aeneas, in which the queen's tragedy becomes a point of departure for a conversation about the body, territory, and power.

Aeneas departs to found Rome—an empire whose history will be carved in marble and cast in bronze. Aeneas's movement is the gesture of the conqueror, of one who subjugates space. Within the logic of Alina Brovina's artistic practice, this is a masculine, colonial gaze upon the world, transforming everything around—both lands and bodies—into a resource for conquest and exploitation.

Dido, however, remains. Her lot is the earth—that which receives into itself, which soothes. Her famous aria from Purcell's opera, "When I am laid, am laid in earth,"—its pliant, tragic recitative sets the rhythm for the artist's works, where material, too, "sings," fabric drapes like a curtain. And at the core of this project lies Ovid's text, his Heroides—the letters of Dido to Aeneas—where myth becomes, for the first time, a personal, intimate utterance, almost a diary entry, translating the epic into the scale of a vulnerable body that preserves the memory of gesture and touch. The scenography that Brovina once created for others now becomes the scenography of an inner landscape—a landscape of memory and trauma.

In counterpoint to the "hard" media of empire (marble, metal), the artist chooses the "soft" and ephemeral: textiles, watercolor, painting. Her sculptures are not monuments to heroes on pedestals, but fragile anti-monuments, corporeal forms that evoke wounds, seams, and internal processes. The line "I will lay me in the earth" acquires a double meaning, in which both the tragic finale and an act of merging, of dissolving rigid boundaries, coexist. The weaving of fabric, the act of stitching, the seams, the pliant, uneven edges—they blur the boundaries of the body; correspondingly, on maps, the crisp routes of conquerors are obliterated, borders transformed into subcutaneous vessels or veins. Textiles that hold the memory of touch become both shroud and cradle.

When I am laid, I am laid in earth—this is an immersion into the space that remains after Aeneas's departure. It is an inquiry into what becomes of territory when it is no longer conquered, and of the body when it is no longer regarded as a resource. It is a lament for lost love that gradually transforms into a quiet, soft declaration of another mode of being: not to conquer, but to receive; not to carve in stone, but to suture; not to depart for glory, but to remain and lay oneself in the earth, becoming part of it.

— Daria Boldyreva