Towering 45 meters above Porto Alegre, MADRE by Brazilian artist Hanna Lucatelli is a monumental act of remembrance, a reclamation of the women whose stories were never written into the official histories of Italian immigration. The mural began with “a trace… something left behind, but still pulsing in the present,” a silent weight that pushed Lucatelli to give form to a presence history kept in the shadows.

At the heart of the work is a deceptively simple question: Who was the woman who crossed the ocean 150 years ago? Lucatelli’s research revealed records filled with men’s names, while women appeared only as footnotes. Her sketches sought the body that sustained daily life on the crossing, the one who carried fear, hope, and continuity “in spite of everything.”

In MADRE, femininity becomes architecture. The central figure’s gesture is both shelter and foundation, “a strength that doesn’t need rigidity to be monumental,” a body that receives and projects, holding up the world on unstable ground. She is sacred not for symbolism, but for her inevitable presence: the guardian of affective memory, the force that sustained dignity through every beginning.

Beside her stands the girl in red, the eldest daughter, already aware of the weight she will one day carry. “Red is not innocence; it is presence,” Lucatelli notes. The younger children represent the horizon: those who will flourish without knowing the cost of arrival.

Painted on the future Italian Consulate, the mural was conceived as a gift, a universal offering meant to reach anyone, regardless of ancestry. Lucatelli hopes it “opens a crack in the heart,” returning women to the center of a story that once erased them.

MADRE endures as a portal between past and present, a reminder that we are shaped by “affections that cross oceans, real and symbolic.”

Giulia Lavinia Lupo

Artworks