Mi niña interna

In 2015, after my father’s death, images from my childhood began to appear in my dreams. With them came back a feeling of being orphaned that had been with me for many years. It did not belong only to one particular event in my life; it was a deeper emotion, a question I needed to understand.

So I began drawing and modelling children.

As I worked, I discovered that I was not trying to reconstruct my childhood, but to meet it again. I understood that, despite the difficult moments etched in my memory, there had been a deeply happy girl, able to play, imagine, care and inhabit the world with wonder.

To model the body I looked at photographs of my children, because I could not find an image that represented what I sensed. I thought I would give her my own features at the end. However, when the work was almost finished, a photograph of me as a child turned up. I was crouching, in exactly the same position as the sculpture. I understood then that this image had remained inside me long before I found the photograph.

Mi niña interna was born from that recognition.

It is not a self-portrait. It is the encounter with a presence that is still alive and that continues to accompany each of my bodies of research.

When the work was shown at the San Nicolás Biennial and, later, at the Biennale d'Arte Contemporanea di Salerno, it received First Prize at both. Many people told me that the girl “had a soul”. I felt something similar: throughout the process I never felt I was simply modelling a figure, but rather meeting a deeply familiar presence.

Over time I understood that this girl did not remain enclosed in a single sculpture. She reappears in many of my works, in my workshops and in the way I understand art.

She is the girl who plays. The one who observes. The one who imagines. The one who cares.

And, in some way, she is still the same girl who today keeps modelling clay with the hands of a grown woman.

With this work began a body of research that remains open: childhood understood not as a stage of life, but as a state of being — an inner place from which it is possible to look at the world again and transform it.