The Journey Towards Her

Archives are magical places filled with “echoing silences”, where stories are kept until someone suddenly decides to bring them to light. Throughout human history, some characters have been hidden under layers of dust, some stories have been pushed aside; and many of these stories happen to be women’s stories.

Fortunately there are women tired of this silence. Sometimes these women meet a mysterious figure that touches something in their hearts – the inciting incident that starts a movement toward these mysteries. This is exactly what happened to Melania Mazzucco and Eloisa Morra. Diana Karenne, director and actress, one of the forgotten protagonists of the European silent era, and Florine Stettheimer, feminist painter and artist from the early 20th century, entered the authors' lives wanting to be seen, and once they made their entrances they were there to stay.

Giorgia Tolfo guided the two writers in a journey to uncover the magic of archives and piece together their creative process. Different stories, different practical approaches, and yet many common elements.

First and foremost, a deeply feminist desire to reverse the gaze, to look at these women from a perspective that wasn’t just that of the men who had already told partial versions of their stories, without giving them the credit they would have deserved.

Mazzucco considered that gaze a “filter to be eliminated”: Karenne’s life was a mystery told in bits and pieces, full of lies and misunderstandings. Her research lasted more than ten years – years of love, of obsession for a ghost that seemed to be out of reach.

And yet, a different perspective emerged, that of young women who looked at her as a symbol of everything they couldn’t have, a model of independence, autonomy, freedom. This double-sided gaze fascinated the writer, and helped her to find her version of Diana, in a relationship that became stronger and stronger, until “I had to let her go”. A separation that – as the writer has already proved with many of her previous projects – is only temporary, an excuse to create something new.

Morra underlined the necessity to overcome the male gaze that locked Stettheimer in a cage, describing her as isolated, excluded, eccentric – a woman without real connections, lost in her own reality. She found an unexpected alternative in the queer gaze offered by Andy Warhol. The artist deeply admired her for her ability to self-represent herself shattering the borders between intimacy and public life. The power of her feminist vision, evident in her self-portraits, created an unstoppable energy that she tried to convey in a “jazz”, frantic, kaleidoscopic kind of way.

The need for deconstruction is an ethical one, a strive toward secrets that are just waiting to be found. Innumerable archives are waiting for young researchers to open and reveal them: Why not give it a try?