Do you know the story of the talking nipple, the white snake slipping from my body on a giant screen, and the sucking throat?

The day before my daughter arrived, I had a dream the same dream that Marina Abramović’s mother once had: giving birth to a white serpent. In my dream, I was on a cinema screen, no audience, only the presence of subconsciousness. The snake writhed between my fingers and ribs. I was both mother and creature, observer and observed.

I pulled pure instinct out of my body and felt a giant muscle pulsing between my legs. My intuition crawled out of my vagina, wriggling like the white snake itself. Night consumed me, because night is the only time I do not eat. The dream is not a vision alone it is body becoming thought, thought becoming body, the simultaneous birth of my daughter and myself.

The theater screen and my body become one: the rooms pulse like my own veins, the silence hums like my breath. Here, between architecture and instinct, dream and flesh, I am fully present yet fully uncontainable. Chiaroscuro.

I. Recently I woke up. I remember straight after giving birth. My bloated belly was empty, and so I digested myself through the eye of a newborn. My face became that of a baby. I saw my silky skin changing into tiny baby hands, belly. Silence. The purest eyes I have ever seen. I saw a baby in the mirror looking at her mother.

II. Theta waves. There are phases when dreams cannot be separated from thoughts anymore. Sometimes I’ve thought my daughter must have been a siren in a previous life. Her cry was the sound of a femme fatale. Or a Kraken. On the border between sleep and waking she holds me captive. Her tongue sharp synapses drawing the last drops of life from every pore.

Hypnotized by nurturing Give her your breast Hypnotized by senses Give her musky oceans and let her nose drain in your armpits

While she drains the life from me and I dissolve in the vortex of her tiny commanding tongue, I digest myself like coffee on an empty stomach. Coffee. Coffee and at least ten dates. Chips and bread.

Fucking during breastfeeding was the best way to consume myself. I finally felt the missing hands and mouths that I’ve missed as a child. She eats my tits, he eats my vagina until the last fiber.

Slowly something becomes clear. Many who were refused by flesh in the first three years will spend their whole lives searching for substitute breasts. Why do women suck dick as if they are praising their mothers? As if somewhere they are begging for a small approval. Men who sucked on my nipples as if they could drug themselves on the leftovers of breast milk.

III. Recently I went to a modern women’s sanctuary at a friend’s house. She told me she only eats one meal a day so her organs can live in peace. I wondered why she was crying so much. And also I was jealous because of all those clear thoughts and emotions. I never digested reality because my stomach was constantly captured by food. People chew obsessively on concepts of love.

I am bloating, and my acupuncture doctor told me that my shit cries for me now, and my brain farts like Hiroshima. Maybe a pathetic breath in between. Because my body can no longer digest all the food. I told her that I don’t like to go to restaurants anymore. Because it reminds me of slavery.

IV. The oral phase is obscene. In men. In women.

Gross devours too much and digests too little truth.

Walk into a bar. An oral addiction to liquid gold and white foam crowns.

Go to a restaurant and you see weak animals searching for a nipple. Seeking intimacy by sucking on a dead body and calling it wealth.

The irony of God, a parody in chiaroscuro: Cupid will die from a cardiovascular disease after eating a thousand tits. Men gnawing on chicken legs, falling back toward their mother’s cunt. Women suck on bananas and praise daddy.

Their pupils wide Bite. Bite. Swallow. Swallow. Swallow.

Desiree van Blitterswijk works across contemporary art and cultural practice. She confronts identity, embodiment, and social conditioning, moving between performance, visual art, and curatorial formats. Based in the Netherlands, she engages with independent initiatives and research driven contexts that challenge the boundary between personal narrative and collective structures, treating the body as a site of conflict, desire, and transformation.

All picture rights are reserved to Barbara Radelja.