Women climbing trees: a photo exhibition on the theme at the Magazzino delle Idee in Trieste

On view until Aug. 25, 2024, at the Magazzino delle Idee in Trieste is a photography exhibition featuring more than two hundred and fifty anonymous photographs, dated between 1870 and 1970, of women climbing trees. Curated by journalist and writer Laura Leonelli, Io non scendo. Women Climbing Trees and Looking Away tells, alongside the images, fifteen stories that interweave photography, literature, and film to explore the freedom and power of climbing, in a setting intended to evoke the atmosphere of a forest. The protagonists of these climbs include Louisa May Alcott, Simone de Beauvoir, Pippi Longstocking, Angela Carter, and the Trieste-based Bianca di Beaco and Tiziana Weiss, along with Riccarda de Eccher of Udine.

In her autobiography titled I am not a mountaineer, Trieste climber Bianca di Beaco tells how her mother, a farmer, spurred her “not so much toward material conquests, but toward a conquest of myself.” Both on mountain peaks and as a child in the trees, Bianca experienced “the dimension in which dreams come true.” This sportswoman from Trieste is just one of many “new Eve’s” who, in order to affirm the need to be themselves, abandoning the stereotypes that bind them to the roots of others, have chosen to climb trees, rebelling like any creature that defies Earth’s gravity to peer at the world from a new perspective. And who, once at the top, firmly affirm, “I will not come down.”

Women climbing trees have always existed, Leonelli points out, but the phenomenon of being photographed in this pose was amplified by the novel Little Women, published in 1868. Jo March, the most iconic of the four protagonists in Louisa May Alcott’s masterpiece, beloved by readers for her rebellious and courageous character (considered masculine at the time), likes to read under the apple tree in front of her house. Jo represents the author’s alter ego, who also identifies with other figures such as Simone de Beauvoir, and was brought to the screen by Katharine Hepburn, another passionate climber.

Another figure is Pippi Longstocking, created by Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren, a libertarian and independent figure who loves to climb trees. Then there is Julia Butterfly Hill, who spent 738 days on a thousand-year-old redwood, becoming a symbol of an extraordinary American ecological struggle. The exhibition also celebrates three great female climbers from Trieste and Friuli: Bianca di Beaco, Riccarda de Eccher and Tiziana Weiss.

Accompanying the exhibition is the book Io non scendo published by Postcart editions.

For info: https://magazzinodelleidee.it/

Hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Closed Mondays.

Women climbing trees: a photo exhibition on the theme at the Magazzino delle Idee in Trieste

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