Protect Me: My Madonna is an Anarchist
CW: Contains nudity
Gio Blonde is a performer and photographer from Romagna (Romagna Coast). Models are Ale, Alessia, Bea, Cat, Cecilia, Debora, Enrica, Eva, Francesca, Gaia, Giulia, Lamu, Libera, Lucy, Ludo, Mary.
“I travel between Lisbon e Italy. For about four years I have been the curator of an artistic project @wildromagna (@wildromagna_2022) that has brought together several artists through photographic calls, workshops & laboratories. Solitude, the desire to travel, the desire to photograph to make mourning and loss cathartic, led me to experience unexpected encounters, so beautiful and so melancholic. Each photographic encounter is a testimony of love, abandonment, escape & return. And I have always done it accompanied by my analog camera.”
Protect me:
My Madonna is an anarchist.
In search of my loves I will go through these mountains and these slopes;
I will not pick flowers, I will not fear wild animals,
and I will overcome the forts and the frontiers."
(G. Della Croce, Spiritual Canticle).
Grandma L. and I sat in silence, she caressed me with the Rosary between her fingers, invoking her Madonna like a mantra, a Madonna like my grandmother, free from the dogmas of the church, magical. A deity said: "impossible to tame like you." The opposite of the asexual and submissive woman that the Church has taught us.
When Grandma returned from rehab, she took trips to sacred sites to celebrate. These rites and signs shared with her in my eyes (but I believe also in hers) had a spiritual quality, they put me in touch with my inner life and my dreams. Even now. Indeed, especially now that L. can no longer take these trips with me.
My Madonna is an anarchist and I am not talking about anomie and chaos. Nor the absence of order or rules. It is an anarchy that wants union, respect, individuality. My Madonna is my revolution; against that whole series of norms and rules that have always wanted me first as a girl and then as a woman, performing, compliant, productive, adequate; but which actually made me feel alien to this system. And even more rebellious. My antidote to all this was with L. every divine place, every invoked Madonna: a warm form, a sacred and welcoming animal. All the good mixed with the bad. All the freedom conquered. And the desire that grandmother L. would stay took me into her world of visions and apparitions that were so desired and feared for me, which she has now handed over to me as an inheritance. Like footprints and tracks. Which I carry on my body and on every body photographed. My Madonna is a mother forever.
It is the place that unites me with L.
Gio Blonde
