REVOLUTIONARY PETUNIAS
Often I would go faraway to look for stories, missing the ones I could see around me. This time I have decided to start again from my places, to go on a journey across this country, Italy, to photograph and narrate the women.
Women have a lot to say, and many of them have always said it through the experiences of their daily lives. Italian society is undergoing a difficult period of conflicts and sweeping change. Within it there are women who stay tied to their traditional roles because these are the only ones they know, while others subvert them and start all over again. Some are living memories often without even realising it. Still others seek more social recognition and when they cannot find it they create it.
The fact that I belong to the multi-faceted feminine world helped to open the doors and share the life stories. I could have looked for stories among the well-known women, already visible to most people, but no. My interests went elsewhere, and did not even look at any official data on Italian population. Instead they wound along the complex and infinite network of womenâ??s relationships.
I found my revolutionary flowers where women make trouble and where, in a state of perpetual becoming, they are able to change and transform. I found them where women, while doing what they â??shouldâ?? start to question it and begin to do what they â??wantâ??.
Revolutionary petunias are the women who stand â??out ofâ?? and â??intoâ?? the boundaries that someone else has imposed.
This project, which began to take a more concrete form in the spring of 2009, taking me around this long country, Italy, to hear, meet, interview and photograph women of "every kind". The idea is to implement by another year a story through images and voices, the words of women who freely tell you. This project is designed to become a book and an exhibition where one side will set out the portraits of women and, in a room specially set up sound, you will hear directly the voices of women portrayed tell you in person.
Maila Iacovelli was born in Rome (Italy) in 1970. She realized photo reportages all focused on an anthropological and social research. In fact all of her works are social reportage works through a personal research, with particular attention to womenâ??s condition , immigration and social alienation.
