Within Her: Before We Were Two

This work explores the experience of my twin brother and me inside our mother’s womb, not as a closed or isolated space, but as the first environment in which our physical and psychological formation began, before we possessed memory or a conscious sense of identity. The mother does not appear as a figure within the scene because she is the space itself: we exist inside her. The adult figures and accumulated elements surrounding us, including her partner and the other people who affected her life, represent the outside world reaching the fetuses through her. Pregnancy does not take place outside of life; the support or conflict a mother experiences, her stability or fear, her relationship with her partner and those around her, her psychological state, nutrition, and physical environment can all influence, to different degrees, the conditions in which a fetus develops and aspects of its developmental trajectory, without predetermining who that child will become. In this sense, the womb becomes the first point at which the biological, social, and psychological intersect. We had not yet seen the world, yet the world had already begun to reach us through our mother’s body and lived experience. The work therefore reflects on identity, memory, and separation: to what extent does the formation of a human being begin before memory, before seeing the world, and even before becoming a separate “I”? And how might we carry within our bodies traces of a period we can never consciously remember?

Being shaped before we can choose does not mean we are never free to choose. The womb sets the first conditions, but it does not write the final sentence of our lives.