100 Women Against Stereotypes: in Milan, Gerald Bruneau's photos tell the story of female science

From January 15 to June 30, 2019, the Centro Diagnostico Italiano, at 20 Via Saint Bon in Milan, will host the photographic exhibition Una vita da scienziata - I volti del progetto #100esperte, an artistic project conceived and curated by Fondazione Bracco starting with 100 women against stereotypes to help overcome prejudices in scientific practice, which the collective imagination still wrongly delineates as purely male.

Indeed, numerous researches on the presence of women in information show that women are rarely approached by the media as experts. It is almost always men who explain and interpret the world: in 82 percent of cases according to the 2015 Global Media Monitoring Project national results. To contribute to the construction of an equal society, in which merit is the discriminator for career and visibility, the project “100 Women Against Stereotypes” was born in 2016 from an idea of thePavia Observatory and theGi.U.Li.A. Association in collaboration with Fondazione Bracco and with the support of the European Commission Representation in Italy.

Alongside the online database, where excellent profiles of female experts in various fields of knowledge are collected, Fondazione Bracco is now proposing a complementary narrative with the exhibition Una vita da scienziata, with the aim of bringing the general public closer to the female face of research and at the same time to represent science as beauty, accessibility and, why not, fun. Biologists, chemists, pharmacologists, engineers, astrophysicists, mathematicians, surgeons, paleontologists, and computer scientists are just a few of the professions, conducted at the highest level, of the female scientists portrayed by renowned French photographer Gerard Bruneau (Monte Carlo, 1947), an eclectic author and sensitive artist. Looking at each portrait is like crossing a threshold, which gives access to protected, private environments, to spaces of research and thought. These are the workplaces of female experts: laboratories, universities, clinics, where every day women and men strive to shift the boundaries of knowledge. “The new awareness of women in all parts of the world is an extraordinary lever of social and political change,” stresses Diana Bracco, President of Fondazione Bracco, “but, there is still a long way to go. The 100 Women Against Stereotypes project is also moving in this direction, born first as a platform, then with a book and now with an exhibition of portraits of some of them who have agreed to put themselves on the line, sometimes in a humorous way towards their profession.”

“Mine, too, has been a quest, between science and women, between the beauty of life and the inanimate beauty of tools and formulas, between the mysteries of science and what for me, every time, is the real mystery: the person I meet,” says photographer Gerald Bruneau. “I found great women, even when small and fragile in appearance, who had the strength and ability to assert themselves and win spaces of respect, responsibility and direction in such a difficult world, which is still strongly androcentric, distrustful, discriminating.”

The exhibition is part of a cycle of exhibitions launched in 2010 by Fondazione Bracco in collaboration with Centro Diagnostico Italiano with the aim of giving patients, doctors and staff the opportunity to enjoy a cultural experience, in the belief, supported by scientific evidence, that it contributes to the overall improvement of quality of life.

The exhibition will remain open until June 30. Free admission. Hours: Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. For all information you can call +39 02.483187559 or send an e-mail to elena.gavardi@cdi.it.

Pictured: Barbara Caputo, physicist, professor of computer engineering at La Sapienza University of Rome and researcher at IIT-Italian Institute of Technology. “A life as a scientist - The faces of the #100experts project” exhibition, photographer Gerald Bruneau, ©Fondazione Bracco

100 Women Against Stereotypes: in Milan, Gerald Bruneau's photos tell the story of female science

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