Millette Tapiador
Accounting; All the Knives in the House (2003)
video; 5’26”
NFS
In 2003, a boyfriend I had just broken up with tried to kill me more than once. The DV unit of NYC’s 71st precinct interviewed me after his arrest. All the ways I tried to hide and get past the family dynamics of abuse -verbal, psychological, physical, and sexual started to leak out of me in flashbacks as this DV unit tried to get me to understand I should have called them sooner; my answers to the questions were “textbook”.
While in three DV counseling programs, and seeing a therapist for all the sex abuse I suffered, my art became about violence. Violence is loss. It feels like something outside you takes things from inside you. In ‘Accounting’, there is imitating how quick and quietly violence unfolds. I have many more art pieces on many moments of loss in my life, of my experiences of abuse. Creating my work fills in the truths that were forcibly taken from inside me.
© Millette Tapiador