Insieme Abbiamo Avvolto I Nostri Segreti in una Foglia
Together We Wrapped Our Secrets in a Leaf
2021—2024
This project explores the topic of gender-based violence, its resistance, and the wider demand for women’s rights with a geopolitical focus on the North-Eastern part of Italy. The research began when I approached the anti-violence center, called the Centro Donna (Woman’s Centre), based in the town of Mestre, in the province of Venice. This work comes in the form of a publication, which contains over 50 images produced and collected during the field research. The photographic documentation is encompassed by the written component that collects personal accounts of the participants, which are aligned with feminist writings to question the complexity of silencing gender-based violence. By weaving archival images from the 1970s with contemporary documentation, I research in what ways images can become a form of collective feminist memory.
"The violence of judgments that tend to follow violence against women and girls has been documented by feminists over generations. Documentation is a feminist project; a life project."
—Sara Ahmed
In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed remarkably notes that documenting violence against women is in itself a feminist project. In her writing, she calls for “a deposit system to show the scale of sexism.” Two years ago, I have embarked into this journey to question the intricate silencing structure built upon gender violence. Through the research and the making, I have utilised documentation as a feminist method to collect and construct feminist historicities, and to claim spaces for these stories to exist and be preserved for the future. I further intend to stretch the focal attention of this work to other contemporary female voices by photographing women in protests and, simultaneously, to collect feminist memories from the past women’s liberation movement of the ’70s in Italy. With this documentation, I hope to be adding to the ‘deposit system’ that Sara Ahmed calls for. A deposit system that showcases the danger of our sexist culture—which needs to be seen.
The cultural studies scholar Kate Eichhorn, in her book The Archival Turn in Feminism, explains that assembling feminist archives was a common practice during the second-wave feminist movement:
“For a generation or two of women born during and following the rise of the second wave feminist movement, inaugurating private and semipublic collections as archives and donating them to established public and university archives and special collections is central to how they legitimize their voices in the public sphere.”
Eichhorn argues that engaging with archives from this epoch is “much about shoring up a younger generation’s legacy and honoring elders as it is about imagining and working to build possible worlds in the present and for the future.” In this temporal intergenerational relation with the past, the art historian and writer Giovanna Zapperi, in her essay Woman’s Reappearance, examines the political importance of archival research from a feminist perspective that enables artists and researchers to a produce feminist historiography, since history, in her words, has too often marginalized women.
"Today, like every other day, we are convinced anti-fascists. On days like these one, however, it is difficult not to be taken down by the grief that celebrates the memories of our sisters who died because of a system that those same institutions tolerate and nurture. Violence is our poisoned daily bread: rapes, femicides. We are not supported, because it is not with advertising campaigns that we will come out of violence, not even with the sensationalism of a press that re-victimises us and abuses violence a second time on our bodies. We will emerge from violence together, just as together in a few decades we are disruptive, emerging from the cage in which patriarchy has locked us for millennia, choosing to enjoy and fight by having abortions, by having children only if we decide to do so, by educating ourselves, by dancing…”
—Non una di meno
Design of the paper: Carmen Dusmet Carrasco
"The violence of judgments that tend to follow violence against women and girls has been documented by feminists over generations. Documentation is a feminist project; a life project."
—Sara Ahmed
In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed remarkably notes that documenting violence against women is in itself a feminist project. In her writing, she calls for “a deposit system to show the scale of sexism.” Two years ago, I have embarked into this journey to question the intricate silencing structure built upon gender violence. Through the research and the making, I have utilised documentation as a feminist method to collect and construct feminist historicities, and to claim spaces for these stories to exist and be preserved for the future. I further intend to stretch the focal attention of this work to other contemporary female voices by photographing women in protests and, simultaneously, to collect feminist memories from the past women’s liberation movement of the ’70s in Italy. With this documentation, I hope to be adding to the ‘deposit system’ that Sara Ahmed calls for. A deposit system that showcases the danger of our sexist culture—which needs to be seen.
The cultural studies scholar Kate Eichhorn, in her book The Archival Turn in Feminism, explains that assembling feminist archives was a common practice during the second-wave feminist movement:
“For a generation or two of women born during and following the rise of the second wave feminist movement, inaugurating private and semipublic collections as archives and donating them to established public and university archives and special collections is central to how they legitimize their voices in the public sphere.”
Eichhorn argues that engaging with archives from this epoch is “much about shoring up a younger generation’s legacy and honoring elders as it is about imagining and working to build possible worlds in the present and for the future.” In this temporal intergenerational relation with the past, the art historian and writer Giovanna Zapperi, in her essay Woman’s Reappearance, examines the political importance of archival research from a feminist perspective that enables artists and researchers to a produce feminist historiography, since history, in her words, has too often marginalized women.
"Today, like every other day, we are convinced anti-fascists. On days like these one, however, it is difficult not to be taken down by the grief that celebrates the memories of our sisters who died because of a system that those same institutions tolerate and nurture. Violence is our poisoned daily bread: rapes, femicides. We are not supported, because it is not with advertising campaigns that we will come out of violence, not even with the sensationalism of a press that re-victimises us and abuses violence a second time on our bodies. We will emerge from violence together, just as together in a few decades we are disruptive, emerging from the cage in which patriarchy has locked us for millennia, choosing to enjoy and fight by having abortions, by having children only if we decide to do so, by educating ourselves, by dancing…”
—Non una di meno
Insieme Abbiamo Avvolto I Nostri Segreti in una Foglia
Together We Wrapped Our Secrets in a Leaf
2021—2024
This project explores the topic of gender-based violence, its resistance, and the wider demand for women’s rights with a geopolitical focus on the North-Eastern part of Italy. The research began when I approached the anti-violence center, called the Centro Donna (Woman’s Centre), based in the town of Mestre, in the province of Venice. This work comes in the form of a publication, which contains over 50 images produced and collected during the field research. The photographic documentation is encompassed by the written component that collects personal accounts of the participants, which are aligned with feminist writings to question the complexity of silencing gender-based violence. By weaving archival images from the 1970s with contemporary documentation, I research in what ways images can become a form of collective feminist memory.