Three women

Three-channel synchronized audio-video installation
Duration: 11’19’’, loop
dimensions vary depending on installation

A girl, an adult and an elderly woman who through their gestures seek each other, comfort and support each other, creating together a liberating dance, an embrace that embodies a shared experience, the possibility of emancipating oneself from predetermined roles and be, if only for the time of the sunset, fully themselves.

In the course of the projection, a number of questions appear from a list compiled in the diary (the original is in one of the display cases) of the artist’s great-grandmother, then 17 years old, who questions her ability to accept the compromises and renunciations involved in married life. Written in the late nineteenth century, these verses are linked to a very specific image of women within a couple: that of a compliant, submissive wife devoted to the care of children and the household.

At the same time these words hint at a feeling of discomfort with these social dictates, these sharp demarcations of roles between women and men that even today do not seem to have found an impartial symmetry.

Significantly, the soundtrack that accompanies the video, elaborated by U.S. composer and performer Colin Self, begins with a noise, the geosonic recording of a vulcanic activity, the crackling of a submerged but inexorable movement, the sound of a vital energy impossible to be tamed. *

* Texts by Francesca Bernasconi taken from the presentation of the exhibition at Casa Pessina.

With: Noemi Ferrari, Ursula Palmy, Alessandra Rigato
Music: Colin Self
Photography: Loris Ciresa
Editing: Aline d’Auria
Color correction: Vittorio Marinese, TTPixel
Mix music: Nicholas Weiss
Costumes: Giulia Fratini
Graphic design: Marco Cassino
Coach contact improvisation: Giuseppe Asaro
Catering: Loris Viviani
Texts from: Ten Important Questions a Girl should ask herself before she gets married!
From the diary of Anita Lardelli, 1893
Transcription: Flavio Zappa, Alpine Horizons
Translation from German: Anna Ruchat

Filmed in Sils Baselgia, Switzerland, 2023

Selected exhibitions history
Solothurner Filmtage
Jungendherberge Rötisaal
22 – 24.01.2024

Casa Pessina
Museo d’Arte Mendrisio, Ligornetto
19.11.2023 – 21.01.2024