Pozzallo Casa delle Donne
Architecture, exhibition / set design / creative direction / art direction
client: Associazione Chora
If places define our imagination and circumscribe everything through a shared code, then spaces are not just spaces. Our body becomes medium and witness through which we become aware of how a certain form of violence generates a certain sensation on our body.
In Sicily, along the Ragusa coastline, there is a city whose story of women’s empowerment is worth telling: Pozzallo.
The choice to act in Pozzallo is based on the unusual role that women have played in recent history of this small seaside town, where women have taken in their hands the business and daily life after men were forced to leave home for long periods of time.
Women have therefore acquired an extraordinary role within the urban reality, a society based on the matriarchy and the glad tolerance of various communities that populate the city with more freedom than in other Sicilian realities. This story of female emancipation, although fortuitous in a nutshell, is the starting point.
The goal of the project is to build a path of awareness that bursts into the urban space during the event; educational architectures defined as “rooms” which, through their shape and their materials, communicate precise moods and feelings related to being a woman today.
Pozzallo becomes the women’s house, an open house that merges with the public space and serves the entire community.
“Pozzallo Casa delle Donne” disrupts the stereotype of the fragile woman who hides in the home and becomes a symbol of feminine strength, the installations become the theater of discussion for extremely contemporary themes such as body shaming, revenge porn, intersectionality, mobbing, catcalling.