Documentary - NOMINEE: Maria Clara Macrì

“In Her Rooms” was born from the intuition gained in the previous years in which I dedicated myself to portraying women, applying research studies on female self-consciousness and performance, which in the experience of being facing each other undressed and without any kind of sexual interest, a real destruction of stereotypes takes place, with the consequent discovery of a unique and at the same time universal world, which binds one woman to another. At that moment, where possible competitions and embarrassments also collapse, new knowledge and the empathy that binds us, as if we were both facing a mirror, takes place, despite the constant presence of our individualities and the medium with which I study them and I. From this it was born the need for an investigation also into the rooms where we discover ourselves, in our moments of freedom and intimacy, as Virigina Woolf rightly writes in her essay "A room of her own", and therefore the idea to leave my room to enter their rooms. Knowing that I could never go to different parts of the world with my own resources, I chose the cities where I was sure to find women from all sides, just to be able to grasp the essence of a new international and global feeling and underline the figure of a strong female transmigration, separated from the bonds of family and marriage. So I started with New York, then Los Angeles and then returned to Europe in London, Barcelona, Paris, Valencia, Manchester, Milan and Rome. In each of these cities I chose most of my subjects by meeting them on my solitary path, only a few of them I knew through Instagram, while most of them I met by chance and selected on the wave of an empathy that convinced me that they were the right people for my research.
They are almost all mix of different nationalities, almost none was born in the place where the shooting took place. With some of them I spent only a few hours, others hosted me for days as sisters. They are women who are choosing freedom of expression in all its forms and who, like me, investigate in themselves and in their creative life an expression of femininity not tied to the standards that have always confined and defined it. The photographs, on film, are the final tangible result of intense dialogues that have led to total intimacy, which I call self-consciousness and which have confirmed the need for a new consciousness and image stripped of stereotypes and giving back to the female body a value disconnected from the clichés that have always defined it, from the sexual object to the market one. During the project I realized that I was living on my skin exactly what I was looking for, even though I didn't have my own room and with all the contradictions that I had to fight within myself, that it wasn't just a journey between the rooms but also inside and outside myself, that I was looking for new answers in myself among them and among the streets of a path dictated more by the jokes of destiny than by my precise will, linking my personal story to this project without a return ticket. “Thirteen Moons to find her” is therefore the book that will enclose this experience, between photos and text.

About author:
Maria Clara Macrì was born in Reggio Emilia in 1987. During her adolescence she began to take an interest in political and social issues with particular attention to gender issues. She lived in Bologna after high school where she graduated in Contemporary World Histroy in 2010 and continues her personal research on the historical and visual representation of the female gender and its associated limits. Meanwhile she devoted herself to writing and publishing short stories under a pseudonym. She moved to London in 2012 and here she approaches photography for the first time. After her stay in London and a brief period of nomadism, she settled in Naples from 2015 until 2017. During the neapolitan period Maria Clara began to select her female subjects in the street and to experiment with them the relationship between empathy, intimacy and female representation through photography, portraying them in the place used as studio of her apartment, a project that in 2016 was exhibited during the festival Off of Fotografia Europea and which was part of a group exhibition at Magazzini Fotografici Napoli. During this period, she worked as a photographer and collaborated in the production of events related to photography, and also produced a series of installations / events "K'nowyourself - performance-installation-photography-art" during which he investigated the concept of sharing the creative moment, (Tela Bianca Naples, Casa Cuma, Arti vive Festival Modena, Eleva and Fotografia Europea Reggio Emilia). In 2017 she moved back to Reggio Emilia, where through the echo she received thanks to Instagram, different women, strangers and not, began to come and find her spontaneously, to be photographed and thus be part of her visual research project on women. In 2018 Maria Clara decides to expand the project by including research on the environments where contemporary women live their intimacy and personal freedom, their rooms. She began to travel in the big cities from New York to Los Angeles, from London to Paris, Milan, to be able to meet women from other cultures and other countries and cross her lonely path, and therefore her destiny, with them. This research will be part of her next publication she is currently working on. An extract of this project was published on Edicola in November 2018.
2019 Nominated at Foam Paul Huf Award 2019
2019 youth talent Italy Photo Award - Premio Voglino