This chapter embodies a theme that has quietly shaped my entire career: the danger behind the edge, both literal and emotional.

L’appel du vide is more than an impulse. It is a state of awareness, a tension between emotional mayhem, self-destruction, and control.

I was five when armed men tried to kidnap me from my father’s house. The motive was ransom. My father was a well-known criminal, known for his ability to con people out of a lot of money, at that point hundreds of millions of dollars, and that notoriety made me a target. A judge later changed my name and placed me and my mom in what was essentially a witness protection program. At six, I entered a different kind of hell: years of rape, physical violence, and psychological abuse at the hands of my mother’s new boyfriend.

I don’t share this to shock. I share it because it’s my reality and much of my work embellishes this trauma. Not to glamorize it, but perhaps, subconsciously, I have been flaunting it. I identified with pain early on. In reclaiming my story, I took authorship over suffering. I began to see trauma not just as a wound, but as raw material. Something I could shape. Something I could use to create beauty. A “poetic darkness”, I used to call it.

But turning pain into beauty came at a cost.

My creative process has always involved re-entering the darkest parts of my life, re-living them to see what I could extract. Emotional darkness became my superpower. I began to celebrate it. I kept diving back into my own misery, convinced I’d find emotional gems hidden in the depth of my own personal hell. And sometimes, I did.

But I also woke something else.

There’s a part of my mind I call The Beast. He slips into my mind, pretending to be a friend. Every time I re-visit the past to create, I risk waking him. The Beast only needs the smallest of triggers; a word, a song, a smell, or even just something I see in the supermarket, and he begins to eat its way through my already fragile sense of happiness. He will make me look for answers I will never find and overthink what hurt me most: how the love of my life broke my heart, betrayal, and the feeling of existential loneliness are some of the themes he wants me to re-live, over and over. He will convince me to give him all my attention, and he will project my biggest fears and an overwhelming emotional pain, in a continuous loop of destructive darkness. My mind is not wired to let go.

So creation has always taken me to the edge, and I always feel The Beast lurking in the shadows, waiting for me to get too close and start the whispering. As an artist I got obsessed with my darkness, thinking it was my purest essence, the most raw and honest I could be. And obviously there was an artistic compensation. But at what cost?

The Beast started to learn how to reach me even if I wasn’t close to the edge. The triggers started showing up everywhere. My life became a constant struggle, avoiding his insidious manipulations.

Then, the 16th of October, 2024, he won. He lured me into the darkness and I fell. A wave of rage, pain, and destruction took over. He wore me out, and he was able to completely infest my mind and convince me how nobody ever loved me, how nobody will ever love me, how everyone in my life has betrayed me and how my existence has no importance to anyone. After sending my partner a message telling him I hoped he would feel guilty for the rest of his life, I overdosed and lost consciousness. My finest moment, clearly.

Probably the explosive mix of sleeping pills, painkillers, XTC, alcohol, and insulin caused me to throw up most of it. When my partner came running through the front door, worried because I didn’t answer his messages, he first found broken plates and glasses scattered on the living room floor,  he rushed to the bedroom where he found me on top of the bed, my mouth filled with vomit and the bed stained with partly digested pills and alcohol.

The day after I discovered a message I had sent my partner, when I was apparently slipping in and out of consciousness.

It said:

Prdon jositomucho tq

Apparently I tried to say: ‘Perdón, lo siento mucho, te quiero’ or ‘Forgive me, I’m truly sorry. I love you’.

This opened my eyes. I had been flirting with a demon and he’d been able to seduce me. I had surrendered in to destruction.

This event made me realize all of the above, that I had been embellishing trauma throughout my career as an artist, as a creative director, as a fashion designer, as a photographer, as a filmmaker and as a writer.

I had been seeking beauty in darkness as a coping mechanism but, in reality I don’t know who I am without this.

I consciously started challenging myself; I visited the apartment I was raped for years as a kid to see if I’d break down, I would stand on the edge of a 330 feet high cliff to take a picture of the void and see if I’d feel the urge to jump, I would strip down naked, surround myself with multiple screens showing videos that would trigger memories of my partner’s betrayal and start painting, I wrote a feature film about the power struggle between a middle aged man and the boy he abused, and many things more.

I learned to be thankful for all the beautiful things I was able to create, and will probably still be able to create because of all of this, and l’appel du vide is my way of celebrating the last 20 years of my multidisciplinary creative path and the new challenges yet to come.

Now, in 2025, at age 52, I am ready to move on and find out.