Fina Ferrara V. 5
HEARTWORK is a moving-image performance by Fina Ferrara which delves on themes of emotion, memory, and transformation. The interdisciplinary performance incorporates elements of installation art, with Fina Ferrara turning herself and her dress as a living installation by placing real hearts, sewn with letters, to convey messages on ‘truth’ and ‘trust’. The moving-image performance was presented at Indra Gallery (London, 2025) as part of the PATHOS exhibition, as well as in the virtual exhibition Fragmentations of Identity organized by Revolú Gallery (New York, 2025), and at the Multicultural Art Festival 2025 at the World Trade Center in Melbourne, Australia.
Taking place in an ominous forest, Fina Ferrara wears an exceptionally elongated white gown which stretches across the open grass within raw nature. The performance taking place in a forest is not random, but rather, a direct reference to the cleansing and healing properties nature provides as a metaphor for the process of recovery from vulnerability. Within the forest, and the performance, Fina Ferrara through the symbolism of a heart conveys a concept of recognizing the gradual restoration of trust in self-truth. This self-recognition acknowledges the idea of how true connections to others cannot be achieved without awareness of the self.
In regard to the sewn hearts, over the span of the performance, Fina Ferrara gradually sews each letter to spell the words ‘truth’ and ‘trust’, with the ‘t’ moved to the right and ‘h’ added to morph the text into the transformed secondary word. As she sews the real hearts, blood drips across her fingers, hands, and onto portions of her gown. The dripping and spilt blood represents trauma, while the construction of the installation configures the primary concept of the physical body (through the heart) becomes a receptacle towards the memory of emotion and how ruminating on such reflections creates a transformation of the self.
‘Truth’ and ‘trust’ in the performance is a recognition of trusting our own sense of truth. Self-respect ensures understanding our own priorities, and as a result, determines the people who are essential in our lives, who also respect our sense of true trusted identity. The performance entailing the sewing of the hearts with ‘truth’ and ‘trust’, played to the audio of soothing yet haunting music, symbolizes the inner voice being silenced gradually over time by notions of fear, traumatic experiences, illusory aspects of the mind, and the intimidation the outside world imposes upon us.
As the performance of HEARTWORK comes to a close, Fina Ferrara, with her exceedingly elongated gown, walks upon the forest while the camera pans to a bird’s eye view revealing the gown as more of a tapestry which seems to integrate with the cleansing and healing properties of the forest. What HEARTWORK reveals to us is how the use of organic material, such as a heart, to construct a configuration and installation over time to communicate directly though silence. The slow process of sewing each letter into each individual heart is an emphasis on the concepts we have been discussing.
The performance of HEARTWORK, in all complexity, can be described as haunting, beautiful, insightful, and disturbing simultaneously. Within the breathtaking forest and the elaborate white gown overtaking the landscape, we can reflect upon the macabre act of presenting these heavily imprinted words, sewn in blood and etched into the hearts of humanity. Such ruminations of applying the art of performance as a message based in constructed installation, placed upon the self to ponder upon, reveals why Fina Ferrara is one of the finest performance artists of our time and why performance remains at the helm of the avant-garde in contemporary discourse.
The full performance of HEARTWORK can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcNfpCQwGCg
