WALK WITH WOMEN
In 2019, my photographic work Love Suicide was selected for WWW – Walk With Women, a national competition dedicated to preventing and addressing violence against women, promoted by the Dipartimento per le Pari Opportunità in collaboration with the MedFilm Festival in Rome.
That year, three of my photographs were selected for the exhibition: Inner Talk, Loved Her Too Much, and Love Suicide. The exhibition was presented during the MedFilm Festival in Rome.
The photography jury was composed of Zeno Colantoni, Flaminia Lera, and Giorgio Nasti. The Best Short Film award went to The Role, by Farnoosh Samadi, while In Her Shoes, by Maria Iovine, received a Special Mention. Love Suicide received the Best Photography award.
Receiving that award was important to me. Not only because my photograph was recognised, but because it came at a time when I was still trying to find my place in Italy and rebuild my life.
I had left Colombia, left behind a violent relationship, and was starting again. I was a woman, a mother, and a migrant, and many things that might seem simple to other people required an enormous effort from me. Continuing to make photographs was already, in itself, a way of not losing myself.
That is why I remember that award as a small confirmation that I had to keep going.
Love Suicide (Metamorphosis) is a very personal work. It is connected to that moment of radical rupture with my previous life. It is not only about a relationship that ended. It is also about leaving a country, separating myself from a part of who I was, and entering a life I did not yet know how to imagine.
Today, the work is called Metamorphosis.
The change of title is part of the history of the work. Sometimes artists return to works they made years ago, look at them from another moment in their lives, and give them a different name.
It was an image born from a transformation I was experiencing in my own life, and that I am still experiencing. Always the cycle: life, death.
Today, when I look at it again, I recognise it as part of the woman who had to leave many things behind in order to begin again.
In 2019, it was Love Suicide.
Today, it is Metamorphosis.
LOVE SUICIDE — WALK WITH WOMEN, 2019
Sources / Further information:
WWW – Walk With Women · MedFilm Festival