The piece is inspired a 1997 documentary called “Partigiani” by D. Chiesa, precisely the short interview with Iva Montermini, a partisan woman relay who lived in Correggio. The photographic cut and the lighting prevented me from reading her face precisely, but I still tried to portray her as a tribute. Iva, in a monumental version, while she evokes the three partisan brothers and the fact that once captured she had not spoken to protect them. 

I was very impressed by her words, when she remembers that after a night of interrogation and torture she was released and returned home across the fields: “it seemed to me that the sky was who knows where” – “The fields seemed to me all upside down”. A harrowing and poetic epiphany: it was so upset inside that even the outside world had completely turned upside down. Those fields were impossible for me to paint, any pictorial attempt (with my language) would have been less powerful than his words. But I had her to occupy that wall. So I represented her thoughtful, moved, while showing a photograph from when she was young. Below is a clear silhouette of a bicycle. The bicycle is no longer there but something remains to evoke it. I thought about Plato. The luminous outline is not the shadow of the bicycle (its memory) but the very idea of ​​the bicycle and the fundamental role it played for the Resistance. Palpable, on the other hand, is the story of Iva as an elderly woman, the precious role of the conservation and dissemination of ‘memory’. For this reason, in the upper left corner I painted a child of today crouching, to represent the new generations, while listening to the story of a distant time.