work
Cassandra. Il diritto di parlare.
| category | Photography |
| subject | Human figure, Political / Social |
| base | 350 cm |
| height | 100 cm |
| depth | 5 cm |
| year | 2020 |
Cassandra
Cassandra, the right to speak, is an intense work on the violent censorship of female identity through the denial of the fundamental right to the spoken word. It analyzes the dark history of women interned in Italian asylums in the early 1900s. Removed and broken through despicable diagnoses. Grim, talkative, pedantic, petulant, bad mothers, wrong people. For the first time in the history of medicine, the photographic images of patients became the cover of their clinical diary, a mark of the body and identity.
The figure of the classical Cassandra rejects Apollo, who curses her by spitting on her lips, condemning her to remain unheard, banned. So close to the social fall into which inmates plunge into the violent places of Italian psychiatry, in a time not so distant. This compact and austere series contains the extreme synthesis of a more complex and structured site specific installation path. Composed of a portrait of a woman, recovered from an asylum archive, replicated several times and subsequently burned on the lower part of the face in order to make the subject devoid of the mouth, essential for being able to speak. The removal / absence imposed through totally uncontrolled and casual burning makes the subject a symbol of not listening, abandoning and forgetting. As if every woman undermined in her mechanism of saying (as unheard as Cassandra) and interned were deprived of the trait of identity. The work is completed with the exhibition of the writing, in 11 text plates, by the author Giacomo Garaffoni and represented live in the individual installations exhibited so far. Each table is "marked" by a blood-stained tooth, a dreamlike symbol of an archaic clairvoyance, linked to dark omens. The same teeth that Cassandra tears inside the writing. Cursed his word, cursed his mouth, cursed his body.
Cassandra, the right to speak, is an intense work on the violent censorship of female identity through the denial of the fundamental right to the spoken word. It analyzes the dark history of women interned in Italian asylums in the early 1900s. Removed and broken through despicable diagnoses. Grim, talkative, pedantic, petulant, bad mothers, wrong people. For the first time in the history of medicine, the photographic images of patients became the cover of their clinical diary, a mark of the body and identity.
The figure of the classical Cassandra rejects Apollo, who curses her by spitting on her lips, condemning her to remain unheard, banned. So close to the social fall into which inmates plunge into the violent places of Italian psychiatry, in a time not so distant. This compact and austere series contains the extreme synthesis of a more complex and structured site specific installation path. Composed of a portrait of a woman, recovered from an asylum archive, replicated several times and subsequently burned on the lower part of the face in order to make the subject devoid of the mouth, essential for being able to speak. The removal / absence imposed through totally uncontrolled and casual burning makes the subject a symbol of not listening, abandoning and forgetting. As if every woman undermined in her mechanism of saying (as unheard as Cassandra) and interned were deprived of the trait of identity. The work is completed with the exhibition of the writing, in 11 text plates, by the author Giacomo Garaffoni and represented live in the individual installations exhibited so far. Each table is "marked" by a blood-stained tooth, a dreamlike symbol of an archaic clairvoyance, linked to dark omens. The same teeth that Cassandra tears inside the writing. Cursed his word, cursed his mouth, cursed his body.
