The power of art and culture emerges as a key ally in the fight against gender-based violence. Indeed, art has the ability to evoke emotions, stimulate reflection, and tell stories that can change the perception of violence. For example, through theater, music, dance and visual arts, artists can address complex issues, making visible the experiences of those who have experienced violence. Plays such as Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” or the “One Billion Rising” project have highlighted issues related to violence, creating a space for dialogue and sharing.
Art also offers spaces for reflection and healing for victims of violence. Art projects involving affected people can become tools of empowerment, allowing them to express their experiences and take back control of their own narratives. Initiatives such as the “Women’s Storytelling Project” have demonstrated how storytelling through art can foster a process of healing and reintegration.
There are, then, several studies on the power of literature in influencing opinions and social norms. Literature could be an effective tool accompanying different art forms, promoting artistic campaigns to challenge gender stereotypes and create positive models of gender relations. Inside films can be poetry, as well as inside songs, so different art forms together can address issues of violence and resilience, inspire change, and mobilize communities.
Lezioni d’amore e nuove rappresentazioni tramite l’arte
Positive portrayals of women and the telling of their success stories help build an alternative image to the dominant narrative. To this end, cross-sector collaborations are crucial because they maximize the impact of art and culture.
Collaborations between artists, educators, activists, and institutions create synergies among these different actors. In this way, large-scale innovative projects can be created that can reach a wide and diverse audience. This is because art and culture are not just tools for entertainment, but vital resources for addressing social issues and promoting positive change.
Investing in arts and cultural initiatives can contribute significantly to combating gender-based violence, creating a more just, empathetic and aware society. The beauty of art lies in its ability to unite people, stimulate critical thinking, and ultimately promote peace and respect between genders. The proposals can be countless and diverse. Through paintings, sculptures and installations, poetic dialogues, and literary debates, artists can also convey the theme of gender violence in a purposeful key, creating works that not only tell stories but also stimulate deep reflection and engage the public in a necessary dialogue.
Dialoghi artistici per proporre nuovi schemi comportamentali
Dialogue involves involvement, new ideas, but also awareness that society is a sum of all of us, representing the totality. Each of us can make a difference. For example, think of visual art: it has enormous power to penetrate, and as I write this, Pablo Picasso’s work “The Weeping Woman” comes to mind. This famous work, created in 1937, is a powerful symbol of suffering and loss. Although not specifically dedicated to gender-based violence, its intense emotional expression speaks to human frailty and the painful experiences that many women go through. Picasso, through his use of color and form, succeeds in conveying pain and vulnerability, inviting the viewer to reflect on injustice.
And how could we not mention Frida Kahlo! A legendary icon of feminist art, she even used her body and personal experiences to explore themes of identity and suffering. In “The Broken Column,” Kahlo depicted her physical and psychological vulnerability after a car accident, but the painting can also be interpreted as a metaphor for the violence suffered by women. The broken spine symbolizes the rupture of body and soul, drawing attention to the fragility of women in the face of traumatic experiences. Also Frida Kahlo, in 1935, described murderous violence against women in her work “Pocos Piquetitos” (A Few Cuts). In this painting, the artist started from a news story about a drunken man who, out of jealousy, stabbed his girlfriend twenty times and, without thinking too much about it, claimed he only gave her “a few cuts.” Through the works of artists like Frida, who address the issue of gender-based violence, we can not only acknowledge and denounce this reality, but also work to build a culture of respect and equality.
If we then think about the effect of images, combined with that of gestures, words, theater has always played a key role in social reflection and opinion formation. Through the representation of real and imaginary stories, theater can help create positive role models and promote gender equality. Plays that address the issue of gender-based violence, such as Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues,” not only give voice to women’s experiences, but also encourage audiences to confront their own beliefs and prejudices. Theatrical performances can serve as platforms for empowerment, offering actors and actresses the opportunity to explore complex and nuanced roles, far from traditional stereotypes. Through the telling of coping stories, theater promotes positive role models and healthy relationships, inspiring audiences to reflect on how to take action in their daily lives. In addition, community theater can directly engage people in discussions about issues of gender-based violence.
Workshops and productions that invite the public to actively participate not only raise awareness, but also provide a safe space for expression and dialogue. This interaction can create a sense of community, facilitating the building of support networks and spreading messages of respect and equality.
In all art forms there is room for the poetic word, which undoubtedly manifests itself through the use of images that take us back to symbolic fabrics to share experiences of enlightenment. Enriched by the contamination with other art forms, useful in inaugurating a model of effective cosmogonies, because it is enriched by so many symbolic dimensions (such as music, cinema, painting, sculpture, theater), poetry is where to crystallize new patterns of relationship, not only cognitive, but experiential, bodily, referring back to palpable realities, capable of supporting reflection.
Creazione di una rete artistica culturale e pedagogico-educativa
The network that is created is complex and of various shades, themes, representative models, with moments of aesthetic, intellectual, emotional richness. Aware of all this richness, with my book “Di un’altra voce sarà la paura,” published by Leonida edizioni, to deal with gender-based violence, during the presentations I thought and conveyed content to the audience about the importance of designing art workshops in schools to promote new behavioral forms. I thought about the usefulness of revisiting artistic and poetic language to orient new generations toward change.
Communication is the pearl of the mouth, and the art of language has the ability to clarify mental images to the point of transparency. I judge this ability, more than any other, to be suitable for resolving a disagreement that often violently troubles us, the disagreement between outward appearance and the deep reality of life.
Art has no ends but can become an instrument of “purevisibilism,” which by entering into relationship with violence, liberates … of a liberation that tears apart conventions, prejudices, creating new worlds while remaining in the world. The unified polygenetics of artistic language, can become a method to recompose not only the unspeakable multiplicity of human behaviors but could use the evocative method to develop empathy toward the other person, with a conjectural lattice, which with eventful texture, creates new solutions to deal with feelings such as loss, possession, anger and instinctual drives.
Art is a tool to be harnessed for peer education, to open up debate, to enhance the public’s sense of being agents of social change, able to convey in peers the knowledge, the attitudes that enable them to develop greater awareness and understanding of the phenomenon.
A communication campaign that uses poetry and other art forms to create an initial upset of those present, a mimesis of the phenomenon of gender-based violence and to talk about the drama of rape trauma, can also propose the opposite of violence, can document the well-being that a group of people or a society could enjoy if empathy is created toward each other, if esteem, mutual respect are educated through sentimental and emotional education. All this without being overwhelmed by a society in which conditions of production and accumulation of objects predominate, in which art becomes only an accumulation of performances. The lived experience must accompany the representation, and art must engage in the recovery of the image that is an act of thought, delving into reality acquiring not only duration but giving life to a spatio-temporal context, which enhances the importance of language, with a new attitude, capable of sowing the seed of uncontaminated liberation, which distances that system of production that makes women’s bodies imagine themselves as just another commodity.
Art must then take possession of the gap between culture and life, penetrate existence, retaining its subversive and provocative charge, in order to gain a social function, with a high didactic, gnoseological and pragmatic quotient, capable of transforming man’s tendency to violence.
Conclusioni
Art is not therapeutic, because it has no end, no function; it cannot cure, transcend, or change people or the world, but it can help emotionally to heal without knowing how or why. Art has its own means of repair, through language, be it verbal, gestural, visual. Using art as a tool can be part of those cultural interventions aimed at changing gender narratives.
For these reasons and with these premises, a solidary union of artists with the history of individuals, of their responsibility as individuals to the moral commitment of life, comes into being.
As is well known, culture permeates all aspects of human life: from dry legal texts to vibrant colors, to the rhythms and emotions of creativity and artistic and scientific play. Culture is how we assign meaning to things. Cultural lexicons can be modulated through art to enhance our understanding of, response to, and engagement with the human, natural, and manufactured world.
Culture embodies our collective humanity, is capable of nurturing great creative minds and promoting innovation, including through pleasure. Art is a useful tool for modifying behavior, acting on the mindset and changing the mental patterns of a society, thus a tool for changing cultural patterns.
The hinge between reconstruction of a new formal model, between the moment of recognition of women’s values in a society is driven by culture, but art can be a key component and a prime vehicle for understanding that evolving means respect-based and balanced relationships.
The article The value of art and culture in combating gender-based violence comes from TheNewyorker.
