Born in Varese in 1961, Barbara D’Antuono leaved Italy to go to Corsica in 1968.

During her stay in Haiti from 1982 to 1986, the « magic », her  inner demons and all the aesthetic of her work as a plastician got revealed to her.

Her meeting with the Baron Samedi and all the Vaudou Mythology, the « non vivant » and his mental and physical break as well as all the traumatic splashes related to the coup in 1986 and atrocities she was the witness of, will lead her into the necessity of saying the unsayble. This unsayable arising under the mask of a « disturbing familiar » undergoes under her sublimatory gesture, a holy/religious metabolisation she condenses into a baroque and flamboyant syncretism.
She breaks down the coherence, the continuity of appearances by her freedom when using space and by her interpretation of perspective. Her compositions are sometimes inspired from storyboards or comic tables, images superimpose themselves and seem to be thrown by accident on the textile, some characters are fleing out of the frame and liberate themselves from the decor.

« I sew like other repeat mantras. I don’t make any decision ahead. Images arise without any consitency but they come to me and it’s an emergency for me to give them form. The needle’s movement appears like a non sense to my reason but I can not help it and it imposes itself like an atemporal scansion. »Sewing, suturing, closing a wound, grafting fabrics above each other, but also « embroidering » in order to give sense, to give witness to my deep desire to connect the two cultures inahibiting myself. Human tissue, mental tissue where the sewing needle, by its back and forth movements, digs holes and empty spaces from which my inner demons flee away. Damaged tissues, torn tissues… and my attempts to join the edges dug out by this gaping that keeps reopening: the breach of being… impossible hemostasis in all cases.

That is within these boundaries between in and out that this double polarity arises like the surface of a Mobius strip: death/life, mother/virgin, monotheism/paganism, horror/fascination, real/magical, visible/invisible…This off-camera field that stimulates imaginary, one tries to see, to spy what is present and absent, this thing that is here but veiled: Das Unheimliche : this disturbing familiar.

From this « extime » (neologism invented by Jacques Lacan combining external and intimate) revelation is arising an exhilarating, dreamlike, ironic, carnival and naive universe in which humor is never far and Haiti always present.