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• The Witches

THE WITCHES 1975-1976

Series of 12 images, various sizes
Photo collage (pearl polythene print on Ilford paper)

 

In the tumultuous opening up to the possibilities that the 1970s/1980s represented for a young woman who wanted to know who she had been and who she could have become, how could one refrain from reading – however remote and unsettling – the "Malleus Maleficarum" (The Hammer of Witches)? I remember the hours I spent in the Sormani library, reading and leafing through different texts where the reproductions of 16th-century lithographs intertwined my emotions and the images which flowed before my eyes took up residence in my mind, unhinging the space-time coordinates, making me feel present and involved in what happened in those distant places. Free to imagine, I then acquired the awareness that I too was undergoing and experiencing that demonisation of the feminine together with those who were swallowed up by the violence of a story that erased unassimilable existences.

       
       

1 the kiss
2 the flight
3 the presentation
4 the ordeal
5 the sacrilege
6 the dance
7 the feast
8 the lunch
9 the hanged
10 the apprentice
11 the transport
12 the abduction