In the tumultuous opening up to the possibilities that the 1970s/1980s represented for a young woman who wanted to know who she had been and who she could have become, how could one refrain from reading – however remote and unsettling – the "Malleus Maleficarum" (The Hammer of Witches)?
I remember the hours I spent in the Sormani library, reading and leafing through different texts where the reproductions of 16th-century lithographs intertwined my emotions and the images which flowed before my eyes took up residence in my mind, unhinging the space-time coordinates, making me feel present and involved in what happened in those distant places. Free to imagine, I then acquired the awareness that I too was undergoing and experiencing that demonisation of the feminine together with those who were swallowed up by the violence of a story that erased unassimilable existences. |
