INTRODUCTION AND VISION

I created Le Voci delle Donne in 2024 as an international women’s art festival, a project that I now promote through Pubblica_Lab, the cultural association I founded, which is dedicated to artistic experimentation and contemporary culture. I launched this initiative with the clear intention of giving voice to the plurality of our experiences, languages, and perspectives through visual arts, performance, music, and the spoken word. At the heart of my vision lies art conceived as a language of transformation, healing, and freedom.

In each edition, I propose to explore a universal theme linked to identity, the body, and rebirth, creating spaces for dialogue between the artists, the public, and the territory. Over these years, I have seen how the festival has become a living place of encounter and relationship, capable of generating community, reflection, and change. I also project it as a tool for cultural, tourism, and regional regeneration, capable of enlivening spaces through the active participation of the community and collaboration with institutions, associations, and local organizations.

MISSION AND OBJECTIVES

My mission with this festival is to enhance contemporary female creativity and encourage our active participation in the artistic and cultural landscape through:

• Building an international network of artists, curators, cultural agents, associations, schools, and universities.
• Promoting relational and multidisciplinary art forms.
• Implementing exhibitions, performances, talks, and workshops that connect art directly with our daily lives.
• Constructing a digital and physical archive dedicated to documenting the artworks and creative processes that take place here.

CURATORIAL PERSPECTIVE: AN ACT OF RELATIONAL CREATION

Creating this feminist art festival has been, for me as an artist, an act of relational creation. It is a living piece that I build from shared connections, experiences, and reflections. The personal is political, and this project is born from that very root. Every small story, every need to be heard as a woman and as a creator, transforms into a thread that weaves our network. I am not interested merely in showing art, but in building deep bonds with the women of our territory; in exchanging knowledge, feelings, and also confronting the traumas that are too often silenced.

The festival is my space to reflect on gender-based violence: to recognize it, name it and, above all, combat it. Through awareness and art, I seek to generate a change in the community, opening dialogues that not only make the problem visible but also offer tools to prevent it. One of the most powerful experiences of this process has been creating all of this from the ground up, with barely any resources. We rely on the strength of our willpower, on the energy of the women who have chosen to participate without expecting financial reward. To all of them, I dedicate a profound gratitude. Their commitment is, undoubtedly, an essential piece of this fabric.

However, I cannot fail to denounce the difficulties we still face for women’s artistic and cultural work to be recognized and valued. It is frustrating to see how, despite the progress, it remains a challenge to have the impact and value of our proposals acknowledged. But these obstacles will not stop us. Every step taken is a victory, every amplified voice is an act of resistance, and this festival is proof of that. We have created something big from something small, and it is only the beginning.

Solo Show by

Selene Pierini

November 15 – 29, 2025

Trauma Archive is an exhibition that traverses the intimate geographies of the body and memory, exploring how traumatic experiences settle into the very matter of being. The show invites us to consider the body as a sensitive archive: a place of stratifications, traces, and memories that cannot be erased but are instead transformed.

Selene Pierini’s research stems from a profound urgency: to give shape and voice to what too often remains unutterable. As a curator, I see her practice as an act of translation and bravery; the artist approaches trauma not as a closed wound, but as a continuous flow, an energy that—through the artistic gesture—finds the possibility to transmute into beauty, testimony, and a path toward healing.

Through painting, drawing, and video projection, Pierini carries out a work of intimate exposure where the body becomes a space of resistance and awareness. The figures emerging from her pieces are bodies that hold back, remember, and search for breath. They are bodies that tell of the fragility and strength of those who have experienced violence and still carry its weight—yet find a new form of existence within the creative act.

The exhibition is configured as an act of listening and accompaniment. Each image is a threshold toward collective memory, an invitation to face pain without turning away. Trauma Archive does not merely speak of a personal story, but of an experience that belongs to many, to far too many silenced bodies. The archive thus becomes a place of strength and welcome: a space where the wound finds its language and silence transforms into a denunciation, a cry and an act of resistance against any form of violence. Speaking out becomes necessary: for oneself, for the other, for everyone. Because naming trauma is already a way to prevent it from happening again.

— Lalula Vivenzi

“The body remembers, the skin preserves, the soul expands.

What I was merges with what I will be, in a continuous flow that always pushes me beyond.”

— Selene Pierini

CLOSING EVENT: ART AND CONSENT

In collaboration with Amnesty International and On The Road, on November 29 at 6:00 PM, the exhibition will conclude with a dialogue open to the public on the importance of consent as a practice of respect, freedom, and mutual care.

Consent—much like art—is born from listening, from the awareness of the body and its boundaries, and from the ability to say yes or no with a full voice. Speaking about consent through the language of art means restoring a political and poetic space to vulnerability, where the body becomes a subject once more, a presence rather than a wound.