«Playing with Dead Things». Reborn Dolls, Art and Empathy

Abstract

The paper aims to explore the Reborning, a widespread phenomenon in the US and Great Britain, although within a specific subculture, where craft women called Reborners rework a doll by disassembling it, painting it and adding all those elements (head and limbs made by sculptors, hair, skin blemishes, heartbeat,…) useful to achieve verisimilitude as realistic as possible with a baby in the flesh. The Reborners operate through the web, managing personal sites where they can show their creations to potential buyers (mostly women) and ambiguously present them both as collectible works of art and as babies to look after. They define themselves both as artists and as people capable of generating, through their works, the maternal instinct; in their intentionally hybrid discourse artificiality blends with reality, even though it never completely coincides with it. Photographs and installations by Desirée Holman, Jamie Diamond, and Rachel Lee Hovnanian variously reflected upon the Reborn dolls, especially in relation to the codified identities of womanhood; instead, the essay will focus on the Frankensteinian imaginary that these dolls seem to develop, already from their very name: in an entirely new way of elaborating mourning, some people commission the re-birth of their dead infants, causing both curiosity and repulsion, stupor and blame for these disturbing memory objects.