From 1923 to 1970, Italian women were forced to learn how to take care of the home. The Fascist government's Minister of Education Giovanni Gentile enacted a reform that required girls from elementary and middle school to learn everything from cooking to furnishing, from managing savings to caring for children. Even today, the patriarchal legacy continues to perpetuate gender differences in domestic work, so much so that according to the Gender Equality Index in 2021, only 18 percent of Italian men take care of the home.
Thanks to BNBIZ Coworking-hotel, a multifunctional space that has supported art projects in the area since 2017, Clara Scola explored the local context with her nomadic project La Fanciulla Educata, narrating gender discrimination related to the domestic, shifting the work of care from the intimacy of the private dimension into performances and installations within public space. The artwork Lenzuola in Fiore places a series of posters within the urban fabric to raise awareness of the role of women in modern society – tasks, duties, functions, areas of work that are considered purely feminine, without any sense or rigour of logic. The posters – as brightly coloured as advertising posters – displayed sexist phrases addressed to the artist during her first public performance in Piacenza: "You are such a woman to marry!", "I would never be able to clean as well as you do”, “You should teach this to my wife!". The choice to operate in public space enhances the idea that the city and the citizen are two symbiotic organisms capable of influencing and growing with each other.
ARTIST: Clara Scola