2012
Long durational performance, duration 30 min (repeated for 6 hours).
Materials: 1 necklace, 9 chains, doll’s hair, artificial white roses, holy images, red ribbon, black textile.
Event | Con i Tuoi Occhi, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women 2012, organised and curated by Francesca Guerisoli in collaboration with Associazione Chan and Municipality of Milan, Italy. Invited artists Elina Chauvet, Chiara Mu and Marta Lodola.
This is a ritual of passage, a symbolic travel through a challenge and personal growth.
This site-specific performance talks about the abusive relationship I was in.
In this work I wear nine necklaces that will add up and increase in weight gradually. Each symbol on them represents the conditioning that women experience in our society, a weight that every women receives from their culture, family, religion, society and relationships. The more chains I wear, the more difficult it becomes to stand up. With the last one, the weight lets me fall down on the floor, where I progressively remove each chain and I set myself free.
1st Real necklaces received by friends – related to my personal story
2nd Silver chain with keys – the beginning of the relational imprisonment
3rd Gold chain with a locker – a house from where you can never escape
4th Silver chain with Saint Rita images – religion as an instrument of control over women
5th Silver chain with white roses – the concepts of purity and chastity have always been used to idealise the concept of women’s sexuality
6th Silver chain with nude colour textile – represents the body skin, the natural protection from the outside is broken
7th Silver chain with doll’s hair – women power has been stolen from a society that see them only as mere sexual objectified individuals
8th Silver chain with red textile – Red is the colour of life and death, terror and sexuality, love and violence
9th Silver chain with black textile – Death, despair, no way out apart from breaking up the circle. This is the last point of warning, it’s time to leave in order to survive.
Receiving gifts and chains is a metaphor of a real issue of our society, where invisible effective signs of violence justify the presence of psychological and emotional violence, which often precede the physical one. Relationships could be a dangerous vortex when violence is involved, and I believe that escaping is the only way to survive.
Nine is a number associated with rebirth, reincarnation and transformation. Here, the nine meanings are visible, carried on and released one by one, building a path for integration and rebirth.
ph e video Daniele Pellizzoni