OFF.ELIA

The room is dark, only a whisper floats in the atmosphere. In the ground, a bed made of salt cristalised the figure of a black woman. It’s Off.Elia, the video-instalation of Epi Neuraska with music of JJ Doc.
If you look at the woman, smells the ambient and hear the music and the sweet chants over it, you realise that the woman is dying. The piece is a contemporary review of the famous Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais. Neuraska attends the Pre-Raphaelites topical image to flip to break the mold and make us think.
First image hits because Ophelia is a girl of color, nothing to do with the Danish girl played by the redhead Elisabeth Siddal. Thus Neuraska questions that nineteenth-century ideal of beauty, in which the pale pallor of the female body is almost like snow. The black beauty is neither on any Pre-Raphaelite painting, nor in all the visual imaginary of the Nineteenth Century, except in Orientalism that looks to the North African beauty like a dream of submission, most of them are representations of misogynistic exotism, like slaves or members of a harem.
Neuraska’s impact shows us an ideal of beauty that breaks that barrier of the Nineteenth Century to bring us a present Ophelia, that never dies by the madness of love lost, but she dies for a cause real and present, of starvation or drowning as relevant in this case by trying to cross the strait in search of resources to bring up their children.
His Off.Elia is not dead yet, or at least not entirely. Is ailing, floating in the water with this wedding dress. I say that she is not dead at all because if you approach to her you can see the eyes opening softly, hear her sigh, and perceive the gently movement of her hands.
Like her, the waters are black, no place for symbolic flowers here, the river has become the angry ocean lulls this beautiful dying.

With this installation Epi Neuraska breaks throughout the Nineteenth Century conception of the beauty, but only a part of it. It is undoubtedly a highly intelligent work that emphasizes the metaphor of the real and present pain of our hypocritical society, no less hypocritical than Victorian England in which the Pre-Raphaelites gave birth to their Ophelias.
My comment is certainly limited to this work, It’s absolutely necessary to watch and interact with the piece to capture all their precious meanings.

By: PhD. Pedro Ortega Ventureira (Universidad Autônoma de Madrid)