Free Female Power is a relational and performative research project that explores the depth of the female condition through artistic practice. At the heart of the project is the use of cardboard masks: artifacts that serve as catalysts for introspection, sharing, and learning. Through workshops and collective performances, participants are invited to engage in an active dialogue with the memories of women from different eras, cultures, and geographies, triggering a process of empathy and personal transformation. Within this framework, the mask is elevated to a symbol of visibility and liberation, restoring voice, presence, and a collective experience to what was once silent.

The project is rooted in a precise political and social commitment, positioning the visibility of women’s stories as a necessary act to promote empowerment, gender equality, awareness of gender-based violence, and cultural understanding. The project’s corpus—which currently includes 360 masks, with a long-term goal of reaching 1,000—testifies to the breadth of the impact generated: an ecosystem of interventions carried out in collaboration with schools and institutions, involving over 500 people in a journey of active participation.

The multidisciplinary nature of Free Female Power is reflected in the heterogeneity of the languages employed: from performance art emerge various works ranging from video and embroidered photography to textile research. More than just a series of objects, the project constitutes a coherent conceptual framework that articulates a rigorous reflection on women’s history, resilience, and identity. The work serves as a vehicle for social transformation, activating spaces in which female memory is not merely preserved or documented, but celebrated, experienced, and projected toward the genesis of new and unprecedented narrative possibilities.

Pescara, Italy, 2025. Performance video, 03:50 minutes.

2025

2023

2022

2019

The Indispensable Ones

The Leap to Community and Collective Scale

The transition from private introspection to relational action consolidated in Calabria during a local festival (sagra). It was there that the first photograph with the community was taken: a portrait of four elderly women wearing the masks, which I titled «The Indispensable Ones.» This street encounter marked the beginning of the project’s mutation into a strictly collective process and defined the political core of its evolution: the certainty that it is ordinary, everyday women who, silently and constantly, sustain the world.

The experience in Calabria radically transformed the scale and ambition of the proposal. Upon witnessing the power of the mask as a device outside the studio, the idea was born to expand the project massively, aiming for 1000 masks. This number is not an aesthetic whim, but a visual manifesto in the making. In this image, the focus shifts from grand historical heroines to an essential anonymity; it seeks to make visible and record that immense network of ordinary women whose lives, affections, and invisible labor shape the true structure keeping society on its feet.

With this milestone, the project moved beyond the boundaries of the self-portrait to become a living, traveling archive of everyday resistance, where the mask thus becomes a mirror available to any woman, showing how we can identify with and draw inspiration from other women who have stood out in different contexts.

The Women Within Me

The Genesis of Free Female Power

The project «Free Female Power» originates from a strictly personal search for identity and self-repair. It was born during a period of vulnerability when artistic practice became the only viable path to channel a profound need: to project and embody the strengths of female role models in the face of my own insecurities. Ultimately, at some point in our lives, all women have wanted to be or resemble someone else; we have drawn inspiration, projected ourselves, and identified with their talents and thoughts.

Under this premise, the project initially materialized through a series of photographic self-portraits using the first 12 masks created with the images of women who, at that time, were my idols—among them, my own mother—and a thirteenth mask bearing my own image.

This experience with the altered self-portrait dismantles the notion of a fixed or one-dimensional female identity. By superimposing these faces, the project demonstrates that identity is a polyphonic space where multiple facets and roles coexist. Different archetypes and voices dwell within us, advising and accompanying us throughout our lives. I am the mother who nurtures, cares, and loves; the fragile and sensitive child; the seductive and irresistibly beautiful diva; the artist creating new worlds; the queen who commands and emancipates; the young rebel, the wise elder, the self-sufficient warrior, the self-conscious servant, the mutating actress, the romantic lover, the chaste virgin, and the erotic prostitute, among many others. By putting on these masks, I was not hiding; on the contrary, I sought to free and accept myself in a sort of psychomagical act that brought to light all the women who already dwell within me.

What began in the privacy of the studio as an individual mechanism of resilience has evolved over the years into a much more complex, open, and relational artistic structure. The project understands that this personal fracture and healing are not isolated events, but rather part of a collective genealogy: the historical continuity of female emancipation initiated by previous generations. In this way, «Free Female Power» consolidates its transition from private catharsis to community-based artistic action.