Second Birth

By Amanda Maciel Antunes

Edited by Cindy Rehm

Second Birth is a split diary, a journey through time, and a series of correspondences between the lives of Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) and Amanda Maciel Antunes (b.1987). These two immigrant artists share a deep faith in the potency of the creative process and the collective unconscious. At twenty-one, Antunes learned English from a worn copy of Nin’s Diary IV. By chance, she now finds herself living in the Sierra Madre home where Nin lived and worked for nearly ten years 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.

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