Ceramic prints of audiometry tests, diary entries, photographs, poems, Cyrillic texts from the book “The Dervish and Death” by Bosnian writer Meša Selimović, and an image of a little girl with a hearing aid from the 1930s and 1950s, which she carried like a backpack across her stomach.
What do the semi-deaf hear? What part of words reaches them as they travel from the mouth to the cochlear nerve? Which fragments of words? What do they feel emotionally when they hear fragments of sound? The semi-deaf is in a liminal, limiting condition, always holding them close to the edge. One is never truly anywhere. It’s like living on a border, where things duplicate, become complicated, and the complications rarely vanish; the past is never over.
The ear is the organ of emotions. It receives information and, through it, allows emotions to arise. Information conveys data and knowledge, but also a whole range of emotions, such as joy, complicity, friendship, and a sense of community, which connect people, creating images of others and, through them, of themselves. Talking to one another is a dance of images and archetypes, of involvement and catharsis. Those who cannot hear well, or cannot hear at all, remain outside this magical circle and, at the same time, are charmed by their own vision. They watch others speak, experiencing emotions they are not part of, while the emotions they themselves experience are a reflection, a reaction. And the perception of emotions arrives as if through a glass, is always detached, and at the same time always full of fear. What if they see me on the other side of the glass, how can act, if all I can hold are fragments of the conversation? How can I respond if I haven’t followed?
Deafness is an invisible disability and therefore difficult to manage, both for the person who is semi-deaf and for those who are part of the conversation.
This condition has always kept me somehow deeply rooted within myself, intertwined with longing, but without ever ceasing to yield glimpses of beauty that I would never want to give up. Silence is full of things and contains everything in their potential. We need to listen to it.
In this work, my semi-deafness enters into conversation with my childhood, the gratitude I feel for books and the written word, as symbols and conduits for emotions that have no need to be heard, or rather, that can be heard with your eyes. This work is in dialog with my anger and frustration for everything that speaks, music, with which I have a complicated relationship. Creating, is a kind of shouting, laughing, feeling emotion in silence, and it depends entirely on me. It is a redemption that will never arrive, and yet it arrives every time I manage to communicate Silence.
I take off my hearing aids and
lie down,
the sun begins to roll on my skin from pleasant
to too strong
yellow-orange flowers appear under my eyelids
ten pairs of arms emerge from the earth,
like the oars on the sides of a Viking ship
they row deep down, covering me
with mud and silt
over and over
I can no longer see anyone nor can anyone see me
I become a primordial being
of clay and breath
without gender or identity
without sight or sound
only moist warmth and orange color
I don’t know how many heartbeats I spend like this
then like a call
a cramp grips me
I contract my gills and from the fossils I emerge
from the skin of monkeys
from the wings
millions of scales scatter all around
without any sense or order — just like that
glittering
like memories
Mihaela Šuman was born in Yugoslavia in 1980. Her work focuses primarily on writing, memory, self-narration, and themes of exile and loss. She experiences art as a need, involving self-absolution, an attempt to re-narrate and re-locate herself, drawing inspiration from disorientation and the blurring of boundaries between worlds. She spent her childhood between Bosnia and Zagreb and, since 1993 has made the Trentino region, Florence, and Turin her home. She is a graduate of the Liceo Artistico LB Alberti in Florence. While in Florence, she studied Italian Sign Language (LIS), created papier-mâché masks with original subjects, and worked in graphic design and illustration. She wrote poetry and short stories, which have been published and exhibited in several publications. From 2022 to 2024, she attended a training course in ceramic techniques in Turin. In 2023, she participated in the group exhibition “Memorie al futuro” at Luoghi Comuni and Associazione País, Turin 2023. In 2024, she participated in the group exhibition “Passaggio a Oriente” at the former Church of Santa Croce in Avigliana. At the Intercultural Center of Turin, she held ceramics workshops for refugees, in collaboration with the Ciac Association of Parma. In 2025, she participated in the ceramics exhibitions: Ceramics in Love in Castellamonte, Terramundi at the Celletta della Sibilla at the Priamar Fortress in Savona, and Le ceramiche del Nord Ovest at the Zauli Museum in Faenza. She is part of the team of illustrators for Disegnami, a storytelling project through drawings of the DIMMI stories of Storie Migranti, promoted by the National Diary Archive of Pieve Santo Stefano (AR).
