I thought for a long time before speaking publicly about this project. On one hand, I felt the need to protect it because it is still fragile, still under construction.
On the other hand, I realized that keeping it hidden for too long would have been almost a contradiction.
How can I work on memory and then remain silent?
Gerbere d’Italia was born from this tension: from the desire to preserve, but also from the necessity of beginning to speak.
There are news stories that last only a few hours. They appear in newspapers, spread through social media, provoke outrage, and then disappear. They are replaced by something else: a controversy, another crime report, another distraction.
The same often happens with femicides.
A woman is killed.
The relationship with her murderer is described. Explanations are sought. Words such as “argument,” “crime of passion,” “jealousy,” or “family tragedy” are used.
Then society moves on. I feel the need to stop, not because I want to remain in pain, Not because I believe art can replace justice, politics, anti-violence centers, or the people who work every day to protect women, but because I believe that a society that forgets too quickly eventually accepts what it claims to condemn.
It is from this concern that Gerbere d’Italia was born: an artistic project that transforms data on femicides into a visual geography of memory.
Not a statistic to be observed from a distance.
Not a list to be archived.
But a map, a flower, a presence.
Why a Gerbera?
I chose the gerbera because it is a simple flower, direct, almost frontal. It does not have the solemnity of a rose, it does not carry the weight of traditional commemorative flowers. That is precisely why it interests me, it is a flower that looks back.
In Gerbere d’Italia, every gerbera represents an interrupted life. A woman who cannot be reduced to a number, a line in a news report, or a category.
The question from which I begin is this:
What happens when data stops being data and becomes bodies, names, and absences again?
This project emerged because, at a certain point, I felt unable to read certain news stories and simply move on as if nothing had happened. Perhaps this is also my way, as a woman and as an artist, of remaining in front of something that is so often pushed aside.
Femicide Is Not a Private Story
For too long, violence against women has been narrated as a domestic, sentimental, and private matter, but femicide is not a love story gone wrong.
It is not an argument that escalated, it is not a momentary loss of control, it is often the extreme expression of a culture of possession.
A culture that struggles to accept a woman’s freedom, her refusal, her decision to leave, and her autonomy.
That is why the way we speak about these crimes matters.
Words are not innocent.
They can conceal.
They can soften.
Or they can name.
In 2025, Italy introduced the crime of femicide into its Penal Code, this is an important step.
Giving something a name means recognizing it, it means acknowledging that the killing of a woman, when rooted in gender-based motives, control, possession, hatred, or discrimination, is not just another homicide within an ordinary story.
Yet a law alone does not change the way a society sees.
It can define.
It can punish.
It can recognize.
But a more uncomfortable question remains:
What do we, as a community, do after giving femicide a name?
Do we name it and then turn the page?
Do we acknowledge it and leave it to the news cycle?
Or do we accept it as a collective wound?
For me, Gerbere d’Italia emerges precisely in the space between legal recognition and human memory.
A Map of Italy We Wish Did Not Exist
The first part of the project is a map of Italy, the red gerberas represent lives interrupted, the gold gerberas represent Anti-Violence Centers. I chose gold because, to me, these places are points of light.
They do not erase the problem, but they open possibilities: listening, protection, and pathways out of violence.
This map is not simply saying:
“Look at how much pain there is.”
It is saying:
“Look where it happens.”
Look how close it is.
Look how it does not always happen to someone else.
A map forces us out of abstraction, every territory carries responsibility, every community should ask itself what support networks exist, which are missing, and which arrive too late.
I am not interested in creating a beautiful image that makes pain easier to bear, I am interested in creating an image that makes it harder to look away.
The Canvases of Memory
Alongside the map are the canvases.
In 2025, I began working on an initial group of 84 gerberas, according to the time frame and documentary criteria chosen for this phase of the research.
I want to be clear: this number does not claim to replace official data, nor does it seek to become an alternative statistic, it is simply the starting point of my artistic process. Institutional data documents the phenomenon in its entirety.
My work attempts to transform part of that reality into visual experience, memory, and material form.
In 2026, the Work Continues—Unfortunately
The numbers change, and the work changes with them, this is one of the most difficult aspects.
Knowing that I am not working with a closed memory, but with a reality that is still unfolding.
Every gerbera is a repeated gesture.
One flower.
Then another.
And another.
Sometimes it feels almost absurd to continue painting and shaping flowers while knowing that behind every flower is a life that will never return, and yet perhaps it is precisely this repetition that prevents me from becoming detached.
Violence repeats itself.
The news cycle repeats itself.
Even our public grief often repeats itself, without truly becoming responsibility.
When Memory Becomes Matter
In recent months I have felt that painting was no longer enough, not because it had lost its strength, but because this project was asking for another form of presence.
Something more physical.
Closer to the body.
And so Gerbere d’Italia is now entering clay.
When I work with clay, I do not feel that I am producing flowers, I feel that I am repeating a gesture of attention, I shape the gerberas one by one, I imagine them as suspended presences, like an impossible garden.
An installation in which the visitor does not simply observe an artwork but enters a memory.
What interests me about clay is that it preserves the gesture of the hand.
It requires time, attention, and care.
It becomes ceramic.
Able to break.
And perhaps memory is like that too.
Something that must be handled carefully because it can fall, shatter, and disappear.
Why Keep Talking About Gender-Based Violence?
Sometimes I wonder whether people are tired of hearing about violence against women, then I correct myself; perhaps they are not tired of the subject; perhaps they are tired of feeling powerless.
Art does not solve that sense of powerlessness, but it can transform it into attention.
In front of an artwork, time changes, we are no longer inside the fast flow of the news cycle.
We do not have to scroll immediately, we can remain.
For me, this is the deepest meaning of Gerbere d’Italia: not to produce more pain, but to prevent pain from being consumed too quickly.
I do not want to create a monument to death, I want to create a place for presence.
Not to archive grief, but to preserve memory, every time a woman is killed, public language seems to search for a way to close the story.
The case.
The perpetrator.
The headline.
The date.
But murdered women are not cases, they are lives, they are broken relationships, daughters, mothers, sisters, friends, and wounded communities.
Gerbere d’Italia is my way of saying that a society is measured not only by what it punishes, but also by what it chooses to remember.
I do not know whether art can change anything, but I know that it allows me to remain in front of what is so often pushed aside.
And right now, for me, remaining is already an act.
A gerbera cannot save a life, but it can prevent that life, if only for a moment, from being treated as yesterday’s news.
And perhaps from that small, stubborn moment, something can begin.
