Anása (breath) is both origin and return. It is the first gesture of life, the rhythm that sustains the body, and the quiet force that resurfaces when identity feels constricted or lost. Rooted in the myth of Demeter and Persephone, this project investigates how feminine subjectivity is shaped through cycles of rupture, resilience, and renewal. It brings together ancestral myth, embodied memory, and the contemporary landscapes that hold the traces of women’s stories.

The work unfolds across two distant yet interconnected landscapes. Eleusis, the ancient site of the Eleusinian Mysteries, offers a passage into the origins of the myth, revealing how ancestral narratives persist through ritual, gesture, and communal memory. Encounters within the archaeological site and the Feast of the Presentation of the Virgin Mary illuminate how myth and ritual continue to live in the bodies and movements of contemporary communities.

Île Verte, a narrow island in Quebec’s Saint-Laurence River, becomes a terrain for research and renewal. Positioned where fresh and salty waters meet, the island embodies quiet turmoil and contradiction, an environment attuned to intuition, rhythm, and the natural world. Days shaped by caring, creating, walking, breathing, and listening form a ritualistic cadence that allows for creative emergence. Removed from domestic responsibilities and relational roles, the body reappears in its fragility, its endurance, and its need for space.

Together, these journeys form a dialogue between inherited myth and lived experience. One landscape is tied to ancient narrative; the other to present-day reality. Their interplay reflects the dual lineage through which feminine resilience, breath, and memory can be understood. Anása emerges from this entanglement of mythological inheritance, autobiographical trace, and creative practice as embodied research. It marks not an ending, but a beginning: a renewed way of seeing, listening, and breathing through the stories that shape us.