News of May

With the new testimonies in May, we face a delicate and thorny issue, still little or not at all investigated in our country: these are the so-called Rabenmutters, “raven-mothers”, an expression that exists only in Germany and that identifies women who, for reasons that often relate – but not only – to the world of work, stop caring for the children they have brought into the world, becoming the object of the fiercest social judgment.

We collected their voices for the Live Archive in Germany with the testimony of Anne, Lena and Brigitta, three women who live in Berlin and who discuss their experiences of motherhood. Anne, after the separation from her husband, left her first two children with him and today she is the mother of a third child who lives with her; Lena lives with her second daughter, having the custody of her first one been painfully taken away; Brigitta, of Romanian origin, arrived in Germany and crowned her desire to become a single mother. Moherhood, fatherhood, caring roles, traditional family, abortion, love, pain, guilt and freedom are the themes of their intense dialogue, with a focus on the testimony of Anne, who founded an association in favor of women who share her life experience.

For the International Series we find the testimony of Alexandra, a thirty-year-old from Cuenca – Ecuador, who strongly expresses her decision not to have children: the reasons for her position depend largely on her sense of political responsibility and the external pressures she feels on herself. The weight of her large family and the questions that are addressed to her, confirm the will to continue on this path, encouraged by her solid feminist values.

For the series “Impossible Monologues” this month a mythical protagonist: the Capitoline Wolf who, through the voice of Gisella Vacca, tells her experience of “motherhood” towards two young men, Romulus and Remus.

In the Stories section, Claudia Mazzilli reads Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russel, an activist for the rights of people QTPOCI + (Queer & Trans, People of Color, Indigenous…), curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, a Black and queer woman, who in her manifesto of cyberfeminism explores the visual arts as a means of overcoming the (multiple) boundaries of the body and claims the contribution of blackness to feminism.

We also announce our participation in  Archivissima 24, The Festival and the Night of the Archives (6-9 June 2024 | 7 June 2024), which in this edition has as its theme “the irreducible matter on which passions are made”. We will contribute with a clip from the Live Archive, which focuses on the passion for freedom of all of us, each with our own way of being.