PREMISE
“The artistic approach allows us to question the facts of society with the necessary distance and to respond to them by fully investing our bodies, our emotions, our thinking.“
Jean-Pierre P., participant in one of the Archives Brûlantes workshops.
Last summer, artist Irene Pittatore and trainer Isabelle Demangeat were in the French Alpes-Maritimes studying acts of femicide trials from the mid-19th century onwards for a workshop on gender-based violence. While the statements of defendants and witnesses flowed before their eyes, with exculpatory positions towards a ”crime of passion”, over their heads, Gendarmerie helicopters patrolled the surroundings of the village of Gréolières in search of a gunman, fleeing into the woods after killing his partner. On the same days, an Italian colleague, threatened with death by her brother, was trying to obtain a fictitious residence to protect her safety. History, geography, the present. The sense of a siege. The persistence of men’s violence against women. What to do?
L’AMAVO TROPPO E LE HO SPARATO
L’amavo troppo e le ho sparato (I Loved Her Too Much and I Shot Her) is an interactive, trans-media artist’s notebook born out of this sense of asphyxiation and driven by the desire to join forces and the most effective tools to counter gender-based violence. The project is conceived by an Italian artist and journalist – Irene Pittatore – and a French trainer and coach with international experience in the field of inclusion and diversity – Isabelle Demangeat.
Your contribution, together with that of the Fondazione Sviluppo e Crescita CRT, will make it possible to finalise the first edition – to be distributed free of charge to schools and associations – of the artist’s notebook in an digital version, i.e. to develop a set of artistic and pedagogical tools to encourage the recognition of the cultural roots of gender-based violence, often unconsciously shared, and its manifestations in order to learn how to counter them. The notebook, which is bilingual (Italian and English), will be designed using the expertise and experience of women who have suffered violence, as well as international professionals from a broad spectrum of disciplines: history, sociology, psychology, forensics, law, art, literature and pedagogy.
WHAT THE NOTEBOOK WILL LOOK LIKE
The content will include narrative, visual, audio and video contributions (to be also activated via QR codes):
➜ interviews and scientific interventions in the fields of psychology, pedagogy, forensics, law;
➜ archive sources: excerpts of historical uxoricide trials that help to detect the recurrence of gender-based violence (State Archives of Florence, Turin, Toulon);
➜ interactive artistic formats: see for example, Bridges to Art by Tea Taramino and the performance-workshop Archives Brûlantes – Femicides in History by Isabelle Demangeat and Irene Pittatore;
➜ posters and printable educational content to be put up in the classroom or at the associations’ premises;
➜ a poster dedicated to prevention, drawn up collectively by the authors of the Notebook and open to contributions from readers;
➜ calls to actions (for individual and groups);
➜ blank pages to write in the form of a personal diary stimulated by questions/images/role-plays;
➜ open sections to be filled in with interviews and research;
➜ individual and group exercises, tests;
➜ pages dedicated to sketches for campaigns against gender-based violence;
➜ tracks for awareness workshops.
As references, this is a publication that lies between the Manuel d’activisme féministe by Sarah Constantin and Elvire Duvelle-Charles and the interactive books by Keri Smith.