Bellies marked by illness or smashed with food to fill gaps, legs traversed by bluish ramifications, collarbones stiffened by emotional tensions, diastemas on insecure faces, stretch marks that aspire to become art: the bodies, often blamed for long years, are the protagonists of the project ( NO) BODY created by Giada Alberti, a young clinical psychologist.
“Faced with the artificial image of the woman’s body, I decided to offer an opportunity to overcome the expropriation dictated by contemporary society, focusing on how much, in reality, the experience of every human being contains”, thus tells the origin of the project born with a call launched on social media, about a year ago.
Choose the part of the body that tells the most about you, photograph it and accompany it with a caption that explains why it represents you: is the invitation accepted by hundreds of women of all ages, social status and ethnicity. The common denominator: being the master and protagonist of stories kept in the ravines of one’s own bodies.
Creating a collective diary of bodies that tell the authentic life with their particular uniqueness is the goal of the Roman psychologist who emphasizes «the female body is often the victim of the patriarchal gaze and the associated aesthetic canons. For this reason, I felt the need to overturn the vision, through the bodies themselves “.
The oxymoronic title (NO) BODY, understood as “not just a body”, also sounds a bit like a provocation. “Through this artistic and therapeutic experience – she says – the women who participate become aware of their body which is not an agglomeration of skin, bones and muscles, but a treasure chest that holds all the experiences they have lived as well as a clean slate on which to engrave their own history “.
The therapeutic approach chosen by Giada Alberti is psychotraumatology which allows different techniques such as phototherapy and therapeutic writing to dialogue.
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“While photography activates the limbic system, a complex of brain structures that play a key role in emotional reactions, writing stimulates the neocortex, seat of awareness and meta-reflection” he explains, inspired by the work Body keeps the score by the Dutch psychotraumatologist Bessel Van der Kolk.
The body feels the blow, in fact. As Alberti points out, illustrating the photos of the project taken all in black and white to convey the idea of ​​universality between the diversity of bodies and experiences, the body keeps track of pleasant or unfavorable events, experiences them in the present and then recovers them through implicit memory.
NO (BODY) thus allows you to know the deep meaning of your body, through the encounter with yourself and with the uniqueness of other women.
This meeting does not take place only behind a screen: a few months ago, in fact, the 170 photographs collected by the Roman psychologist became an exhibition set up in the village of Monterotondo. Accompanying the exhibition, which sees different shots rotate every month, are psychological-experiential workshops and moments of multidisciplinary study with professionals on issues that revolve around the female figure: from emotional addiction to eating disorders up to violence and revenge porn.
“The project is constantly evolving, we aim to make the exhibition itinerant, in the coming months we will certainly stop in Rome. We have had proof that it is an excellent tool for opening up intimate suffering through the power of sharing, a source of relief and reflection“, Concludes Giada Alberti, taking as an example the testimony of Cristina, 73 years old who joined the call, showing herself almost completely naked because” finally proud of the tiring process that led her to accept to live in that body, an atlas of the wounds that have become awareness ” .
Source: Vanity Fair
