Femina Sapiens is a photographic project that calls for feminine knowledge related to the land and ancestry. The starting point is personal, positioned and individual – my interest in the Sierra de Tramontana in Mallorca – but, currently, the scope has expanded and challenges an entire community. Women are the protagonists of an experiential knowledge that connects with the body and nature in their purest state.
Over the years I have developed a very strong bond with the Sierra de Tramontana, a landscape where hiking is practical and which is characterized by a very special vegetation and way of building: the “pedra en sec”. This technique, declared intangible heritage of humanity and used by populations since prehistory, consists of fitting the stones together without the need for binding material, seeking maximum contact between them to let the mass of the whole and gravity act. Its presence is not only a paradigm of sustainability, but also transmits a primitive force, linked to the past and in close communion with the natural elements around it. Since I began to walk along its routes and paths I was aware of this energy and the connection I felt with the mountains, the trees, the fauna, the historical vestiges and, above all, the rocks. I had the need to photograph it, to try to capture the way in which the landscape communicated with me. Over time, my intuition became more refined: I perceived the magic, the secrets, the wisdom collected by women who had previously inhabited the territory, practiced rituals, invoked goddesses...The intensity of the journey led me to share it, to contact other women who They helped express in images the relationship of interdependence with nature. A relationship based on instinct, experience, touch, attentive listening to what each rock and each plant has to tell. A knowledge that has always been championed by witches, midwives, doctors, wise women who conspired together.
The result is a series of black and white photographs that build a double story, biographical and choral: on the one hand, some corners of the landscape and the women located in them express my own feelings towards nature and ruins full of history; On the other hand, I invite colleagues of any age, body and condition to express their connection and motivation with the place that welcomes them. Feelings of freedom, expansion, intimacy, recollection, union or sorority arise when walking barefoot across the land and coinciding in the same journey. On an aesthetic level, the images translate into a dark universe, loaded with textures and eclectic symbology. Animals, access keys, shells, books, cracks, rocks and more rocks...My intention is to transport the viewer to enigmatic and atmospheric scenarios in which they can experience that feeling that Tanizaki described "that the air in those places contains a thickness of silence, that in that darkness reigns an eternally unalterable serenity..."