"We can’t neither reduce existence to the body or sexuality, nor the body or sexuality to existence. Nothing comes first, but all at once. Sexuality, and let’s assume gender as an equivalent term, is a series of relations and attitudes, less biological than a dialectical process". By Jan Avgikos, "Seeing our bodies," Tema Celeste 35 (Autumn 1992): 38.

How do we qualify feminine experience, and then quantify that experience through visual and symbolic representation?

The history of women’s self-representation goes against the abstraction of the female body and its loss of meaning, by presenting women in progress instead of just actresses, models and perfect goddesses.

In the 1960s, women took on their body and their sexuality to turn inside out the stereotypes on femininity, produced by men for men, populating the media and the collective imagery. Most of their worked stemmed from the belief that the personal is political.

In the 1990s, the representation of women’s sexuality offered women artists an imaginary space where to start the self-reflexive discovery of their subjectivity and the redefinition of their position in the world as experimentation, as a complex and open identity.

Many women artists, through the self-representation of their bodies, have shown the ways in which a woman’s body and psyche are in a constant state of becoming. They have tried to re-appropriate their image, since in our society the "cult of woman" may have absolutely nothing to do with women. In fact, with respect to pleasure, sexuality and erotic display, women have historically been denied subjectivity. Throughout history, women have also experienced in varying degrees a deep alienation of their soul from their social role, victims of the schizophrenic Madonna/whore dichotomy.

My work is a contribution to women’s vision of their body, subjectivity and sexuality in the context of symbolic and cinematic representation. Both my films "Uncovering" and "L’isola Sommersa-Hidden Island" try to figuratively give voice to the power of the womb.

In Uncovering, I use the mirror as a metaphor, to play with the notion of a woman making a spectacle of herself. My woman presents her own less-than-perfect reality as going beyond the binary opposition of muse or femme fatale, thereby replacing polarization with multiplicity and complexity. The mirroring experience becomes the moment for the search and redefinition of the self while filmmaking becomes the space where my woman can reinvent herself and be free to express her dreams despite social, cultural and economic constraints.

The theme of the mirror is very relevant in women’s art, because it suggests the difference between external appearance and internal reality.

Uncovering addresses both visually and conceptually the cinematic gaze and the historical objectification of the woman’s body by proposing a female gaze and by negotiating a relationship between the public and the private.

"L’isola Sommersa-Hidden Island" is the autobiographical journey of a woman, but it is also a metaphor for everyone who journeys in a hybrid culture. Memory as travel is the driving force of this film’s the narrative: memory, with its unpredictable twists and turns, its crossing and re-crossings, its mixing of seemingly unrelated moments.

The big emphasis put by women as myself on autobiographical art has helped us trace a process of empowerment, self-discovery and self-realization.

In the realm of representation though, the feminine voice is still searching for a language in which to express itself free from the categories of the master narrative. In fact, many women, including myself, have confronted the difficulty of having to create an alternative symbolic system in order to express their visions - of themselves and of the world.

However, the stereotyping process is very hard to subvert, because we have identified ourselves for so long with the ideals and role models that others have created for us. As a consequence, whenever a female embraces a medium and tries to mold it to her own expression, she has to deal with already-set forms of representation.

"Uncovering" and "Hidden Island" are my subjective answers to the question: how can we represent the female body and her experience from a woman’s point of view?