becoming a self in history, becoming a self in my street

Marcia Torres

Marcia is from Venezuela. She was twenty-eight when I heard her story. She came from a family where the adults were so vulnerable themselves that they couldn’t be nurturing parents. Marcia worked in an ice-cream shop and loved mountain biking. Her only security was her work and her boyfriend Sandro. She told me that she and all her friends had no personal dreams. Instead they watched American soap operas all the time. They existed only to make enough money and to live through these make- believe worlds.

This period of her life came to an abrupt end when Sandro was killed in an accident.  

No longer able to cope with her life in Venezuela, Marcia looked on the internet to find a place to work in Britain. She chose a community in Sussex that was inspired by the work of Rudolf Steiner, of whom Marcia had never heard. From there she found out about the existence of eurythmy — a form of movement inspired by Steiner. Although she did not have a penny to her name, nor any security, she applied to study eurythmy in a small school in the West Midlands in England. She has pursued this training ever since, working every spare hour to fund her existence.

Marcia attended an event where she saw some of these stories. Afterwards she came home with me and told me her story. She asked if it was possible to translate the stories into Spanish and to take the exhibition back to Venezuela. She said she herself had been caught in a kind of hypnosis that was only broken by the death of her boyfriend. This had been hard but it had meant that she had had the chance to find her own life and her own story. She wanted to show this work to her old friends in the hope that they too would respond to it, and that they could discover that their lives were significant and worth searching for.