Mangia il Dolore is a piece created over the span of two years in prayer for the Italian matriarchs of my family and for myself. It locates ancestry in the body, as well as in the spirit, and speaks to the manifestations of ancestral stories through materiality. Intergenerational pain takes form in the flesh, sometimes as physical pain, sometimes as sickness. Mangia il Dolore was/is the process of transforming pain– the emotional elements who become somatic, who flare in times of stress, who keep me in bed accompanied by the timelessness of brain fog. Within timelessness lies the potential for connection to what is beyond the body. Dissociation can be a space of  liberation and immense emptiness. Mangia il Dolore ties the ancestral body and the physical body together, recognizing that our own healing stretches beyond self, rippling into the past, into mother, mother’s mother, into the beyond.