This multimodal research explores how women survivors of domestic violence conceptualize and narrate their womanhood. Through an Art-based Engagement Ethnography, it explores how 7 women who live in Casa Rifugio (Italy) – a shelter that provides accommodation for women that are escaping a situation of partner abuse – narrate their gender identity through visual art and verbal articulations. By looking at how their gender narratives relate to hegemonic discourses that traditionally place women as inferior, the research positions itself within the growing body of literature that conceptualize gender-based violence as something embedded in social-cultural power structures rather than as something merely personal and individualistic. The result of the ethnography is a written text and an exhibition. By combining art as a way to reach a wider audience and a written component that anchors the artistic practice in ethnographic fieldwork, the research aims at presenting the argument that the perceptions of “what it means to be a woman” continue to shape relations of gender in Italy and elsewhere, establishing the very context within which gender-based violence can occur and persist.
Artist Statement
Giada Avi is an Italian visual artist, filmmaker, anthropologist and storyteller. Holding a Bachelor’s in Arts (Italy), she has now just finished her Master’s degree in Visual Ethnography (Netherlands), throughout which she explored the boundaries between art and anthropology and learning about the potential the coexistence of the two can have. Through a multi-disciplinary / feminist / participatory / reflexive approach, she likes to work in collaboration with marginalised and vulnerable communities, using her fields of expertise and interest to raise public awareness and enhance social change. Primarily working with (moving) images, she uses experimental storytelling influenced by ethnographic insights as a way to reach a wider audience and convey messages on a deeper level, provoking empathy, sympathy and understanding to whoever comes across her work. Combining aesthetics, visual art, and ethnography enables her to fully explore the multilayered complexity of social experiences and subjectivities, and reflect on how her own lived experience relates to the one of the people she works with.