B to B, by Brenda Moreno

The relationship between men and horses goes back to the origins, when the strength of the second was placed in the service of the former for the needs of agriculture or for the necessities of transporting distances which the march would not have permitted. The welfare of the one depended on the well-being of the other, and the roads were punctuated with relays where animals and men could find rest and food. All our imagination is fulfilled with stories of horses : love stories, wild stories, sad stories…

Brenda Moreno chose to use the metaphor of this relationship to dig back in search of her identity. B to B is a book about memory, and therefore about what shapes us throughout life, but also about memories that we have.

The book begins on the cover with a « mise en abime » of a identity picture, decadred that would have « slipped » out of its housing. We open the book to discover a series of identity photos of Brenda at different ages. The identity photo is the document that attests our existence. This is the document we have to show to prove who we are and, most importantly, that we are indeed the one we claim to be. It has even been amplified recently when the regulation of these small photographs has become hardened, standardized to the extreme, without allowing any expression on the face, thus pointing the fact that we have to be as neutral as we can !

Well this book is quite the opposite, it synthesizes the existence of emotions and memories more than any official notion of identity. Through the book, Brenda searches for herself, in a Proustian approach where every memory is a brick of the building she is trying to reconstitute. The horse is recurrent, like a subliminal image, perhaps of another life, reincarnated in her present body, with the pain that comes out of this forgotten past. The memories are sometimes imprecise, or childish; Brenda experiences collage to express her ideas, it is a work in progress, or, to better say, in the making, in reconstruction.

The book is a vast psychoanalytic collage in which Brenda poses mental images, collages, juxtapositions, as well as family photos including their ghosts. The ghost in a family history can often be the source of disorder that must be fought. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of it in this book, or at least we think of it, in the suture of an image, or the blur of another. Dreams are present, nightmares too! We have to unravel all this, pull a thread, follow it and see where it leads us. We leave the book exhausted, filled with an impression that we are missing some keys, but that, nevertheless, Brenda has opened us doors to rooms that still have to be explored. The impression that Brenda gave us a lot and that we know her a little bit better, like having spent the afternoon with a friend, talking about the time passing, about ourselves, memories, hopes, well… life.

When the book is finished, we close it, but there are still pages : a fiery black horse arises in the frame, rebel to any appropriation, and two pages where, then, identity photos have disappeared. We no longer need them, no answers in these small documents, it is elsewhere, probably in the pages that preceded.

At the end of this book, I remind a film of Bela Tarr : The horse of Turin. The film begins with the Turin episode of Nietsche’s life, and then evokes the life and destinies of a farmer, his daughter and their horse. Of course, it is another story, but maybe this is one of the doors half-opened by Brenda Moreno?

Published by Witty Kiwi, softcover, 88 pages 17 x 21.5 cm, text by Carmen Dalmau. Edition of 900 copies.

More info : https://www.brendamoreno.com/book