Second Birth

By Amanda Maciel Antunes

Edited by Cindy Rehm

Second Birth is a split diary, a journey through time, and a series of epistolary correspondences between the lives of Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) and Amanda Maciel Antunes (b.1987, Brazil). At twenty-one, new to the United States and living in Boston, MA Antunes learned English from a worn copy of Nin’s Diary IV. Finding deep resonance with Nin, Atunes found many parallels between her life and Nin's. Both were immigrants to the US and each shared a deep faith in the potency of the creative process and the collective unconscious. By serendipity, Atunes found that her home in Sierra Madre, CA was also where Nin had lived and worked in the 1950s.

Long before French feminism called for écriture feminine, Nin conceived “the language of the womb” writing composed through expressions of female experience. The diary became her ideal form, a space to record impressions of life alongside memories, dreams, and aspirations. Antunes echoes the form of the diary through her image and text translations inspired by her research of the Anaïs Nin Papers archived at UCLA. The fragments collected in Second Birth reflect meditations on motherhood, memory, time, the creative process, feminism, dreams, death, and the small moments that make up a life.

Amanda Maciel Atunes is currently exhibiting her work, "I've Got to Tell You Something Now" on the first floor gallery at Craft Contemporary.

Hexentexte, 2023, softcover, 8 x 10 inches, 97 pages.