I know, the name of my blog will probably be recognized by only a very few of those reading this, but I decided to start this adventure of a personal blog, which has been in my mind for a while during the quarantine time for the Covid-19, with something close to my personal tastes and feelings but capable to express the kind of attitude and look that I wish for myself and our society and, which appears to be more urgent during this time of forced self-seclusion.
Green Gloves is the title of a song from the album “Boxer” by The National, where the protagonist, to describe how much he misses his friends, decides to wear their clothes but bringing with him part of what he is, the “green gloves”. He decides to sit on the chairs, to sit where others sit, and to live their experiences, to look for an empathetic experience, a continuation of the narrative of their friends’ relations.
Of course, people who know me may well ask “what is the connection to you? Don’t you work in contemporary art?”
I do, but I care about art which looks for meanings and forms of meanings and looks for conversations with the society and history. This time demonstrates that each of us is deeply connected to the other, because of the spreading of the virus or because our lives were in need of the other’s care. This time has demonstrated how distorted our perception of ourselves and of our relations to the world has become, seeing human being as isolated subjectivity.
At the same time, many criticalities become clear because of this rupture of continuity, and one of them is certainly women’s life condition: schools being closed, losing work and the opportunity to work through the shutdown and the limited recovery. Women, who are already paid less and in more precarious employment, become the ones most damagingly effected by the Covid-19 crisis. This is why I put as the image to represent the blog a detail of “Panel X. Tortures of Women”, 1976 by Nancy Spero. This work of Spero’s inspires me, the social and historical references that she makes in her narrative is a part of her constant effort, that continued through her lifetime, to find a voice in the world, for herself and for others. Specifically these works describe the historical dramatic female conditions of the time in which they were made, and the suffering of women under brutal dictatorships, but they also speak of the social and cultural reins, the cages and constraints, that have held women throughout history and which blocked them from being protagonists and from shaping the world they inhabited. But it should not be forgotten that she also spoke for their life force, their thought, and, and centrally for her, the profound and generative energy of their sex.
The world she illustrates was like now, when the drama of the pandemic has made even more evident the kind of social and economic constraints in which women live, everywhere.
Because of these things my blog wants to be a voice in a collective conversation to create a sharing space and a sharing experience through art, cinema, music and culture in general, trying to wear the “green gloves” of our relation with time and history and in the present.
To do that I thought to take the voice of a specific focus, the perspective of a woman’s experience, of course because I am a woman but also because it’s unimaginable to look at the daily struggles that women still live through in their social lives, and in themselves, without being aware that the world will continue to miss half of its energy and meanings unless the changes, that have been begun, come to be fully realised.
