Before the War
March 2026
Before the war began in Iran, I visited two exhibitions.
Bellezza e Bruttezza in Brussels. Metamorphoses at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
Both showed me the same thing: Ovid is still alive, through the question of beauty.
Not as heritage. As an open wound.
Brussels ended with Pomona — the one woman in Ovid who chose her own story. Amsterdam began where she left off.
I became Narcissus, standing before the mirror of history.
The exhibition began with Mendieta — a body born from earth and ash, before the gods arrived. Around me, every metamorphosis had already happened. But Leda was still becoming. And Medusa had already arrived in peace.
In front of Leda and the Swan, I felt it — the weight of another Trojan War already forming.
Isamu Noguchi’s Leda gave the myth a new body: abstract, raw — the pure energy of two forces meeting.
Then came Juul Kraijer — and the myth found its future.
Her Woman and Swan transformed the myth itself — beauty became subjective, political, and the woman’s own. Her woman is no longer the victim of a god’s desire or an animal’s force — she is a participant, choosing her own path.
In another of Juul Kraijer’s works, I saw a modern Medusa.
Surrounded by snakes, her gaze turned inward. She rests in a stone-like peace.
I thought of the hair of women in Iran.
She is every woman whose beauty power tried to silence.
Outside, ugliness. The war had begun.
The new Helen behind this war will not say my mother was deceived by a Swan.
© Alennott 2026.
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