My grandmother, a deeply religious woman, lived her body as if it had a divine mission: to give life. In her vision, the female body existed to serve a sacred duty.
Motherhood was considered a vocation, a responsibility towards the family, towards God and towards society.
But what about me?
With all of this in mind, I envisioned a scene — a symbolic gesture.
I selected archival photographs recalling the iconography of the Madonna and Child, composing a collective narrative made of women. These images are printed on fabric, transformed into small patches. A woman begins to sew them, one by one, in a repetitive, mechanical rhythm. In the background, traditional lullabies and folk songs play — dissonant, stripped of poetry — numbing the gesture, which continues out of inertia.
The act of sewing carries a powerful symbolic weight: it is women’s work, the silent and invisible labor that stitches together stories and generations.
At the end of this long and exhausting process, the woman has assembled all the pieces — creating a blanket, a metaphoric womb. She wraps herself in it, curls up inside. The lullaby stops. What remains is the sound of her heartbeat, echoing like an ultrasound.
The mother becomes the mother of herself.
I made this, in memory of me.
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A special thanks to Alessandra Urangi.
Images taken from the Archive of Ethnography and Social History of Lombardia and the Photographic Archive of the Stories of Bergamo.