Il sangue delle donne|The blood of women
IL SANGUE DELLE DONNE. TRACCE DI ROSSO SUL PANNO BIANCO
THE BLOOD OF WOMEN. TRACES OF RED ON WHITE CLOTH
Supported by Fondazione Pasquale Battista, The blood of women. Traces of red on white cloth is the book produced by Manuela De Leonardis within the framework of the artistic project she has created and curated. It involves sixty-eight international artists working with a menstrual cloth. The physical and conceptual link between these women and their menstrual cloths is extremely close. In their own language and with this awareness each artist has addressed different aspects of femininity: birth, puberty, maternity, reproductive choices, menopause, sexuality violence and feminicide, considering that some of them are still taboo both in western and global society. In the hands of Ilaria Abbiento, Manal AlDowayan, Adele Angelone, Elizabeth Aro, Wafa Bahai, Alessandra Baldoni, Carolle Bénitah, Takoua Ben Mohamed, Saša Bezjak, Tomaso Binga, Rita Boini, Rosina Byrne, Giovanna Caimmi, Primarosa Cesarini Sforza, Rupa Chordia-Samdaria, Sara Ciuffetta, Lea Contestabile, Karmen Corak, Mila Dau, Vlasta Delimar, Kristien De Neve, Maria Diana, Isabella Ducrot, Nilüfer Ergin, Cristiana Fasano, Maimuna Feroze-Nana, Simona Filippini, Emita Frigato, Pilar, Barbara e Stella Marina Gallas, Silvia Giambrone, Felicity Griffin Clark, Maïmouna Guerresi, Susan Harbage Page, Sasha Huber, Susan Kammerer, Fariba Karimi, Eglė Kuckaitė, Hanako Kumazawa, Silvia Levenson, Wenwen (Vivienne) Liu, Lôw (Estabrak Al Ansari, Raiya Al Rawahi, Tara Al Dughaither), Barbara Luisi, Anja Luithle, Victoria Manganiello, Florencia Martinez, Patrizia Molinari, Elly Nagaoka, Ana Maria Negară, Yasuko Oki, Novella Oliana, Sonya Orfalian, Lina Pallotta, Sara Palmieri, Chiara Pellegrin, Sofia Rocchetti, Elisa Roggio, Anna Romanello, Paola Romoli Venturi, Virginia Ryan, Cinzia Sarto, Ivana Spinelli, Silvia Stucky, Ketty Tagliatti, Judy Tuwaletstiwa, Laura VdB Facchini, Maria Angeles Vila, Nicole Voltan, Ruchika Wason Singh, and Deborah Willis the cloth has become a strong witness for reflections which go beyond gender issues. These works talk about intimate and personal events, evoking memories resurfacing from oblivion and finding a new place in the present. Anonymous stories, known stories, ordinary stories are all first-person narratives, metabolized and elaborated through metaphor, irony, poetry, literary and pictorial citations. Accompanying the curator’s critical contribution, the volume includes Ciclo (1974) by Mirella Bentivoglio, critical texts by Annalisa Zito(Fondazione Pasquale Battista), Rossella Alessandrucci (Gallerist), Federica Formato (Gender Language Researcher), Alberto Massarelli (Psychoanalyst), Arianna Di Genova (Art Historian), Stefano Barchiesi (Gynecology and Obstetrics consultant), Maria Cristina Gasperini (Ethnologist and Expert in Japanese language and literature), Rita Boini (Journalist), Niki D’Attoma (writer), works by sixty eight artists with their texts, a critical contribution by Jerica Ziherl (Vasta Delimar’s work), Denis Volk (Sasa Bezjak’s work), a poem by Valerie Fermariello (Fariba Karimi’s work), and the front-cover with Per una espressione nuova/ Towards New Expression by Suzanne Santoro published in 1972.
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Il sangue delle donne. Tracce di rosso sul panno bianco
The blood of women. Traces of red on white cloth
curated by Manuela De Leonardis
with the support of Fondazione Pasquale Battista
167x237mm | pages 192
Italian/English
Translation Edvige Nanni
Layout Franco Cenci/Studio Idea
Coordination Dino Lorusso, Ninni Castrovilli
Date of publishing January 2019
Postmedia Books
ISBN 9788874902279
Exhibitions
When I was 13
When I was 13, Sara Palmieri, 2017
When I was 13 I became a woman.
When my mother was 13 she learned to do cross-stitch at the sewing classes for tomorrow’s good wives.
When my grandmother was 13 she cut her long tresses and she was no longer a child.
This menstrual cloth has been embroidered together with my sister, my aunt and my mother, with my grandmother’s hair. Braiding the threads that tie the famale memory of my family, I chose the menstrual cloth as a place, a map, a uterus, to affirm my belonging and at the same time questioning how the social conventions used and still use to define what it means to be and become a woman.