Females is the story I have been telling for about fourteen years about the women in my family, from the youngest to the oldest. A story about the poetics of the passing of time, about the succession of the seasons of life, about death and life intimately intertwined, but also about Sicily, which becomes the stage on which the deep and ancient relationships that bind these women are depicted. Sicily, with its lights alternating with shadows, the dense and vivid interiors of the houses, the lace, the wedding dresses, the flowers, the veil of nostalgia that covers everything, the small trinkets that also live for a long time, the endless summers, the blood ties.
I began this story without imagining that it would become a small photographic family epic. Photographing ‘my women’ turned out to be a necessity; at a certain point in my life, I set out to capture the story of the women in my family as it unfolded before my eyes, paying attention to the different generations and the roles played by the real protagonists of my life.
Over the years, I noticed that the images I accumulated became fragments that I collected with deep care and affection, fragments that had a narrative coherence and emotional intensity that shaped my own story. To do this, I opened the doors of our homes, getting to the very heart of our existence, photographing both the interiors we inhabited and the Sicilian landscapes, both of which became our backdrops. I didn't want to tell the highlights of our lives, but the everyday moments, those where nothing seems to happen, where silence, emotional suspension, revelations, epiphanies, entanglements, become moments of pure poetry. Where life is life and nothing more than that. This is implicit in the lyricism of existence, which is what my photos are about.
Each woman in my family represents the essence of being a woman: the strength, the fragility, the courage, the change, the rebellion, the contradictions, the rupture, and the infinite love that women create, spread or retain.
In the images of Females, bodies change over time, absences alternate with presences, embraces become eternal, gazes transcend the present and a sweet nostalgia for what is, what will be and what will never again come to life. These images will preserve it forever.
This story, which has been ongoing for some 14 years, has taken on an even stronger value for me and for the family as a historical memory and as a point of continuity with the new generation of women who are growing up and who continue to write that imaginary lifeline that contains us all.
https://www.ornellamazzola.com/
Text: Ornella Mazzola
Voice: Charlotte Brown (AI)
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