Lago di Como

Lake Como is beautiful, wealthy people retire there. It’s the north Italian idyll: lakes, mountains, villas, wine, food, lifestyle.

It is also a place of fugitive arrivals and departures—of tentative community, precarious labor, and unbelonging. Cutting across differential hierarchies of race, culture, privilege, and legal status, patriarchy draws a fault line, marking feminized lives as available to violence and subjecting survivors to (further) social and political invalidation.

Every year, the Como branch of Telefona Donna responds to over 250 new cases of gendered violence and sexual assault, offering psychosocial support, legal counsel, and love to women in distress. Shared in this cycle of Personal Accounts are the difficulties, hopes, and asserted life practices of nine survivors: artists, writers, cleaners, mothers, entrepreneurs. For some this is home, for others yet another making of it, having arrived in Lombardy (for so many reasons) from Senegal, Morocco, Brazil, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Albania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Connecting this tight Telefona Donna community—across their many differences—is not the ‘common bond’ and social inscription of ‘victimhood,’ but the nourishment, affection, solidarity, and joy through which they exceed it.

Como is beautiful. Made beautiful in these quotidian offerings of arrival, transition, homemaking and repair: in Zohra’s prayers, in Diarra’s bar, in Ecaterina’s photo book, and in the fragile remains of what these personal accounts choose to reveal and withhold.

—Gabrielle Goliath

Produced with support from Galleria Raffaella Cortese. Special thanks to Telefono Donna Como, whose careful facilitation and psychosocial support made this work possible.

Survivor Offerings

In addition to what is presented (and withheld) in the installation itself, collaborators in Personal Accounts sometimes choose to share supplementary offerings which are made available online. These may be narrations of their experience or practices of survival and wellbeing, such as prayers, poems, playlists, recipes, or artworks.

A woman who chooses to withhold her name
Daniela
Diarra
Ekaterina
Mirela
Paola
Patience
Zora