My current work is about violence against women. I have always been committed to the Women’s Movement. Therefore I created this new project  to draw people’s (both women and men’s) attention to this issue.
http://festivalviolenzaillustrata.blogspot.it/2013/11/no-more-mostra-fotografica-contro-la.html

The title is NO MORE, like the main slogan of the worldwide demonstration One Billion Rising, which celebrated a day of struggle against the violence upon women on February 14th 2013: on that day one billion people in 207 countries rose and danced to demand an end to violence against women and girls.

Women dancing worldwide with an incredible energy gave me the idea of creating this photographic project whose aim is to testify our rising against the ones who kill women, saying “I love you”….

I never liked campaigns against violence which represent women as the eternal, weeping, battered and bruised victims. So I decided to produce symbolic pictures whose subjects are female forms wearing dresses or T-shirts  with slogans against violence upon women. I accurately reproduced the slogans of the demonstrations without adding any personal idea, as I completely agree with them.

The outfits are different in style  and the slogans, created using different materials (paillets, wool, tempera) are “written” in many languages. In fact, sadly enough, women are victims of violence all over the world...

My project is not only concerned with photography and it was not very easy to organize. It took me a  lot of time to find a factory available to produce pasteboard forms according to my design, because in the catalogues I mostly found top-model like figures: too thin and too tall to be “normal” women.

I created the outfits with slogans in Italian together with stylist Barbara Lippi Bruni, who currently works for Italian TV. We used second-hand dresses or T- shirts, trying to be creative and trenchant. Later on I decided to add outfits with slogans in other languages I made up myself, whereas the slogans in French, Spanish, English and Portuguese are the ones used in the demonstrations during the One Billion Rising in France, Spain, South America, Portugal, U.S.A. and England. Some friends helped to translate the slogans into Turkish, Arab and Chinese, languages.

Then I focused on taking pictures, according to my original project. To provide likely urban landscapes for these female forms, I used pictures I had previously taken in different areas of the world, and particularly in Barcelona, Bilbao, Granada, Istanbul, Las Vegas, Lisbon, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Miami, Milan, Ostuni, Palma de Maiorca, Prague, San Diego and Vilnius.

The places surrounding the shapes are deliberately not too easy to recognize, and the languages of the slogans do not always match with the places. In fact, the mixture of idioms and settings with no specific connotations, is meant to portray contemporary globalization. After matching the outfits and the backgrounds, I recreated a shooting position that could be compatible with the landscape the shapes had to be assembled with, and I took pictures of the dressed shapes in a neutral background. Finally, after profiling the shapes, I assembled them with the chosen urban landscape