Second Birth is a split diary, a journey through time, and a series of correspondences between the lives of Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) and Amanda Maciel Antunes (b.1987). These two immigrant artists share a deep faith in the potency of the creative process and the collective unconscious. At twenty-one, Antunes learned English from a worn copy of Nin’s Diary IV. By chance, she now finds herself living in the Sierra Madre home where Nin lived and worked for nearly ten years in the 1950s.
Long before French feminism called for écriture feminine, Nin conceived “the language of the womb” writing composed through expressions of female experience. The diary became her ideal form, a space to record impressions of life alongside memories, dreams, and aspirations. Antunes echoes the form of the diary through her image and text translations inspired by her research of the Anaïs Nin Papers archived at UCLA. The fragments collected in Second Birth reflect meditations on motherhood, memory, time, the creative process, feminism, dreams, death, and the small moments that make up a life.
Amanda Maciel Antunes is an LA based multidisciplinary artist working in painting, costuming, performance, writing, and installation art. She was born and raised in the countryside of the state of São Paulo, Brazil.
Antunes was born in Sorocaba, Brazil, and grew up in Salto de Pirapora, São Paulo. After living in São Paulo in the early 2000s, she relocated to the east coast of the United States, where she launched a career in costume design and founded an arts and culture magazine called Spirited. She has designed costumes for the stage, including for the award-winning production of The Flick with Annie Baker and Hollywood’s debut of Possum Carcass, with David Bucci. She has also designed and made costumes for musicians, including Katie Chastain’s dress in “Snowshow”, directed by Nathan Johnson, and Icelandic artist Kristín Björk Kristjánsdóttir.[1][2] Her recent exhibitions include: Solo Exhibit Skeleton Women (LA Artwalk), Midnight Roses (Nous Tous Gallery Chinatown LA), Don Quixote (Montserrat DTLA), Autopsicografia (Moon Huts LA) and she is currently working on two proposed installations and experimental performances in Los Angeles and Reykjavik, respectively.
Copies of Antunes’ book Second Birth are available through HEXENTEXTE here
HEXENTEXTE is a Los Angeles-based collaborative project dedicated to the research, presentation, and publication of works at the intersection of image, text, and the body. HEXENTEXTE borrows her name from Unica Zurn’s book of anagrammatic poems and automatic drawings.
