When women rethink the world. An all-female exhibition in Milan featuring three contemporary women artists

From April 9 to 14, 2019, the spaces of Ventura Centrale in Milan are hosting the exhibition Una stanza tutta per me (A Room All to Myself), which showcases the works of three contemporary female artists: Flora Deborah (Evian, 1984), Giulia Manfredi (Castelfranco Emilia, 1984) and Francesca Piovesan (Aviano, 1981). The title of the exhibition, curated by Sabino Maria Frassà, refers to the essay A Room of One’s Own written by Virginia Woolf: for the occasion, the three women artists were invited to think of a project that would enclose their vision of the world in a “room.” The result is an exhibition displaying fifteen works in three rooms, all of which share a high degree of experimentation with materials and artistic techniques, from Francesca Piovesan’s heat-sensitive photographs to Giulia Manfredi’s resins to Flora Deborah’s installation of bacteria. The exhibition aims to show how women can rethink the world through art, reiterating, a note says, “the need to completely overcome the gender-gap and to give women the full possibility to express themselves and to demonstrate through their abilities that they can reinterpret reality, improving the world.”

Francesca Piovesan’s room is titled Uneasy: it is an unprecedented project, and the Friulian photographer’s shots, at first glance black monochromes, actually consist of glazes that dissolve when the work is touched by the viewer’s warm hands (thus activating the symbolic aspect of the work: it is human warmth that allows people to rediscover, see and face their fears), and reveal, once touched, wounds and marks left by time on the bodies of women chosen by the artist based on their history or past. Still, on the other hand, is the title of Giulia Manfredi’s room, which exhibits works in which resin seems to succeed in crystallizing the existence of a dead plant, and addresses the question of the dichotomy between life and death, an obsession that often ends up eroding and shaping the way we see ourselves and our identity. Finally, I’m too old to float is Flora Deborah’s room, presented for the first time in Italy: for the French artist, the heterogeneity and ambivalence of the relationship between mothers and children is fundamental, and consequently the installation, built around symbiotic cultures of bacteria (with the older ones staying afloat until they get too old becoming heavy, sinking and making room for the younger ones) is a kind of in vitro reconstruction of this relationship.

The exhibition, promoted by the nonprofit project Cramum, is made possible thanks to the support of Municipio 2 - City of Milan and the VELA Group’s Aria brand.

Pictured: Giulia Manfredi with Still.

When women rethink the world. An all-female exhibition in Milan featuring three contemporary women artists

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