In potenza sono tutto is a project by artist Cecilia Luci realised thanks to the support of Casa Internazionale delle Donne and UDI – Unione Donne Italiane. The project stems from a work that the artist conducted for three years through meetings with female inmates in Italian prisons, in particular at Rebibbia, with the aim of confronting women with a painful past, victims of a society that was unable to understand and help them.
As the curator Benedetta Carpi De Resmini emphasises: “The artist’s desire is to promote reflection and stimulate public opinion on the burdensome subject of detention, investigating the most intimate aspect of female prisoners by entering a place that, being apparently inaccessible (the prison), is metaphorical of the equally apparently inaccessible human soul”.
The faces of the women in the prison are placed alongside those of the nuns who lived in the Complesso del Buon Pastore. A place of imprisonment and penitence, the complex was the first women’s prison established by the Church state. The project tells two stories – one past and the other present – that meet eachothers. Women with a turbulent past who are given a new life through a new image are juxtaposed with the names of those women who did not make it, barbarously murdered by their companions, husbands and the men close to them.
In Potenza sono Tutto is a work on place and memory: four photographic projections and a performance evoke the women prisoners and nuns-custodians of the Prison Institute, thus reactivating the history inherent in the place and bringing to light the events that took place in the 19th century, when the convent imprisoned women removed from society.
