In memory of Franca Rame
Belt for 7 women, 200 x 20 cm
Canvas, crochet work with string and cord, embroidery cotton threads and silver thread, clay, sewn Cyprus pomegranate peels. clay tiles engraved in Italian, Latin, Greek, English, Yoruba, Kurdish.
Quotes from Franca Rame, Euripides: Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauridae, Zahara Babangida,Titus Lucretius Caro, Livy, Rumi, Emily Dickinson.
A belt that can girdle mother earth there is not. the belt girdles the upper womb to indicate the lower threshold (hymen) is single. Since there is no collective womb, a belt for many women, encircles nothing.
Segnare la vita : LIMBUS OF LIGHT
Procedure:
the mother earth that has no boundaries is one. The confined earth, the confined womb is a double idea that belongs to the patriarchal model of the divided world. Division by boundaries surrounding states, cities, wombs: land, daughter, sister and wife are property. To be used to extend borders: from marriages of neighbors, to ethnic, “religious” rapes of a seed of one religion/state in the wombs of women of another. The extension of boundary and domination occurs through women’s bodies. The Rape of the Sabine women is Rome’s first expansionist action. On actions like these we base our “civilization.”
