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LITTLE GIRLS

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Biographies absent faces present for years 9 a 19
Mythography of young partisans

A video installation by Lenz Foundation

 

three-year period 2022-2024
Lenz in Resistance for partisan women

In the context of a permanent theatrical and visual project on the themes of the Resistance and the Holocaust, the Foundation annually creates a creation for the Celebrations of 25 April. TR2/4 will focus on the role and biography of the Partisan Women of the Parma Resistance, in collaboration with the Historical Institute of the Resistance and the Contemporary Age of Parma.

 

Introductory notes by Francesco Pititto

When only the name and surname of a person remain and their whole life implodes in that Angioletta Nerina or Iolanda Benvenuti or in the registry sign of sixteen other young women, time needs bodies.
Of those eighteen girls who experienced the war with body and suffering, and partisans fought against that, we need to restore their image and likeness.
Words spoken by faces of today, young girls born between 1926 and the 1937, from nine to eighteen years old each in the guise of other faces of the same age, contemporaries as they traveled from then to now.
Words of today but as they were said then, day by day, from image to image without knowing which one was the real one. Imagoturgy of time, from name and surname only to faces that are all different, virtual but in real memory of lives lived, not behind but inside that name and surname.
The documentary image, the visual painting, the real and imagined dialogues are what remains so that time continues its ellipse and, restoring body and voice, everything doesn't go back to the same as before. Revolutionary motion, like the Earth around the Sun, chorale of Memory and the present.

 

On the occasion of the celebrations of 25 April, the creation of a visual macro-installation curated by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto is planned and presented within the ex-industrial spaces of Lenz Teatro. The installation work will be combined with various educational-cultural actions conducted with the consultancy of Fabrizia Dalcò, historian and journalist, editor of the volume Biographical Dictionary of Parmigiane, Berti Publishing House (2016) in collaboration with the Historical Institute of the Resistance and the Contemporary Age of Parma.

Thanks to the important database created by Maddalena Arrighini for the ISREC Historical Archive, A list of forty-eight women engaged in partisan activity as minors was identified, born between 1926 and the 1937. Of the other eighteen there is no documentation but only their names and surnames are known. It will be precisely starting from these 'absent' biographies that the visual installation will give shape and voice to the 'missing' experience of those adolescents who, in that 1943, in opposition to Nazi-fascism they made a choice of freedom and justice, putting their lives at risk.

In this new project by Lenz, memory and contemporaneity will intertwine, present and past, through the creation of substitute portraits, of performative miniatures that will temporarily restore presence and identity to the many unknown women of that time.

It will be a re-constructive process through which, superimposing the lost faces of then with the rediscovered faces of today, they will imagine looks and gestures, words and memories, emotions and feelings, passions and desires, thoughts and ideals of those very young Partisans whose trace has been lost, of which we have only one name left - a sign of r_existence.

No external correspondences will be sought, because we will not give in to the nostalgic seduction of the historical appearance, but an iconography of reality will be drawn, embodied not only by young Euro-descendants, but also by the new Italians of Afro-descendants, who will regenerate with their presence the same principles of freedom and justice for which they sisters partisans fought.

The project includes a training course dedicated to teachers of secondary schools in Parma and the province. A discussion meeting is scheduled to present the project and the course, to stimulate participation and spread the idea of ​​an educational community possible thanks to the synergy between school and theatre.

Also thanks to the history of the Partisans, rediscovered and narrated with a guilty delay, the story became richer and it happened because we began to investigate, find, and therefore to remember the role played by women: thanks to many studies it is now clear that, women too, they make history (together with men) and they become protagonists.