Andreina Bertelli
edited by Vittoria Surian

"After Auschwitz we can write only wounded words", says Edmond Jabès. Or paint from a perspective of grief, sometimes of estrangement. What the two artists share in common, when Andreina Bertelli paints or engraves and Lisabetta Serra writes her poems, is a "desperate hope" in humankind, in the possibility of redemption from evil. Bertelli expresses it through an anguished adherence to classical models, as if in quest of the origins, and employs a pictorial language that repudiates abstraction in favour of a warm-hearted partecipation in human sorrow. Serra's exact lines, sometimes broken by the anxiety of fully telling about human destiny , could be ascribed to the trend that starting from Umberto Saba moves towards narrative poetry and focuses on the relationship with others.

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Giovanna Gentilini

by Vittoria Surian

about the fast food body

She had done something that her father had disapproved of, although nobody remembered any longer what it was. Her father had dragged her on to the cliffs and had thrown her into the sea. This is the beginning of the tale "The Skeleton Woman" in the book Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. But we do remember. The story is written down the in the holy texts. It is the same reason why God chased Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Since those faraway times, fathers have considered the body of woman as the seat of contamination and perdition. In modern Western society, whose survival depends on the fastest possible consuming of goods, the body too becomes a commercial object. The bodies of women and children are used as goods to be used, bought and sold. Having eradicated the function of the female body from its original sensuality and sexuality, which is also its power of generating life, has contributed to making it an object, a thing to be used and disposed of. The fathers must overcome their fear, they must pay with an act of love and reparation, and so they can give back to the woman her integrity of body and soul. Travelling back through a female genealogy which takes us to the cults of the Great Mediterranean Mother Goddess, we shall be able to rediscover the body of woman as the seat of wisdom, that is Sophia.

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Nicoletta Moncalieri

by Vittoria Surian

Nicoletta Moncalieri reflects on lyrical language by carrying the representational variety onto the conceptual plane, in a surprise procedure balanced between perception and paradox. In each page of the book there emerges a self contained story which, however, connects to the following pages in its becoming, and collects, in its development, moments of the poetry by Anna Cascella Luciani, whose tonal play, between lightness and saddening, is revealed in crystals of pure form.

Eidos Publications thanks Maria Luisa Minio-Paluello

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Alberta Pellacani

by Vittoria Surian

The weight of emptiness

Gazing as if from a borderline country between the Self and the world. Steeped in Western culture, young men and women, real princes and princesses of our time, in this latitude, they feed on nothing at all in order to feel they exist, they starve themselves, looking towards death but thinking of life, until the determination of their loved ones consigns them to a specialized clinic. I have met them there, hanging from a thread. Isabella Scalfaro's poems reflect insistently on the human condition, its enigmatic quality, its resistance to being put into words. Thus the words, light and yet clear, follow the pressing relentless restleness, in the grief of living, in the the effort to exist and in the gamble of a loving exchange, as revealed by the gaze of adolescents with ragged and torn identities whose threads could run together like those seen in the drawings, thoughts like scratches, in some inextricable weaving, or in absolute absence.

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