Futuro interiore

Gender disparities constitute one of the major obstacles to sustainable development, economic growth and the fight against poverty. 

Reflecting on these issues, supporting female self-determination and fighting for equal rights at all levels of participation inevitably leads to addressing dramatic issues, such as violence against women, a cancer of tremendous relevance. 

As an artist (but also as a woman) I attempted an approach to the theme that could combine my poetics with an iconic narrative arising from heterogeneous suggestions. The work is dreamlike and carries a symbolic value, proposing a monumental female personification that recalls some teratological pieces that I have painted in the past. 

A young woman whose head turns into a mass of octopus tentacles slides between her fingers an elastic band holding a sleeping newborn baby wrapped in drapery. At the center of the composition, the girl’s corset shows an alienating environment that crosses her body from chest to belly, revealing a bare stage that houses an empty armchair and some objects. 

The title alludes to the verb tense of the future perfect, which is revealed on an iconographic level as an internal future, a prefiguration of what is supposed to be her destiny, based on how she decides to act. 

The same verbal tense is also called the compound future and this made me think of a temporal space with place, with reference to that session that awaits everyone as protagonist and judge of their own show, almost an inevitable psychological ethymasia that from the sphere of the sacred jumps to the phenomenon of consciousness. 

Next to the armchair there is a suitcase and some books, symbols of knowledge and understanding of others. I didn’t want to refer specifically to the world of work, family, relationships, but implicitly there are all these elements in the work. In the sleeping child, the care of the children (mostly outsourced to the mothers) but also the idea that by coming into the world one is already strongly conditioned (in some cases by a hostile environment and opportunities that are difficult to seize, by abuse and ignorance). 

The tentacled head is a double symbolic reference. On the one hand, the difficulties to be faced, the harassment suffered, the tyranny to which one is subjected. On the other, adaptability and the power of renewal, a true regeneration. In fact, flowers emerge from the tentacles on the left side of the work. Tied to them, to balance the tentacular movement, hangs another elastic band holding a gasping fish, to evoke the relationship with oneself in the face of the shocks of the world. Perhaps it is precisely this fish that I identify with.