Rethinking the femicide of Desdemona
The Eastern Mediterranean University Faculty of Communication and Media Studies of the city of Famagusta in Cyprus has involved Cristina Chiappini as a teacher in the project/exhibition Othello International Art and Design, asking her to interpret the story of William Shakespeare’s Othello in a modern key.
In the words of Christina Chiappini’s student team members:
Within the Communication Design Laboratory 1, managed by Cristina Chiappini, and thanks to the help of Enrico Gisana for the motion design part and Karen Venturini for having introduced us to the theme of femicide and gender violence, we have developed with the class a path in a contemporary key to what was the tragedy of Desdemona, perhaps one of the most spectacularized feminicides in the history of the theater, which reminds us so much how the media amplify current cases of feminicide.
The team worked with “moving images”: static images that tell other stories through movement and the duplication of parts. In the movement, in the speed, in the slowness a path of identity and narration is created, in which there is no need for sound.
The sentences taken from Othello are still lacerating, in the distrust and superficiality of a blind and full of himself Othello. Shakespeare’s words are dressed in contemporary images of 20th century women, normal women and symbolic women. They are all part of that tragedy, in which psychological and physical violence takes them all, regardless of age, historical context, their socioeconomic status, by color.
It’s crazy but it’s true to see that after 420 years nothing has changed!
Project by Cristina Chiappini with the special collaboration of Enrico Gisana and Karen Venturini
Teaching assistant: Thomas Monaldi
Students: Giorgio DeLazzari Pinnelli, Sophia Manconi, Elia Mosconi, Beatrice Bonelli, Martina Damiani, Francesco Volpini, Samantha Fabbri, Francesco Pergolini, Luca Vulpinari, Alessia Curti, Caroline Riva, Marco Zelotti, Peter Lazzari
text composed in Nure by Fabrizio Schiavi
