Anonymous photos from Laura Leonelli’s collection.
For centuries the women were left at the foot of the trees. Women as roots destined to nourish the fruits of other existences: the fathers, the husbands, the children, the eternally free masculine who instead climbs every tree, and from above looks into the distance, grows and conquers the world.
It seemed like an eternal condemnation, the worst because blessed by all power. Instead some women rebelled and embraced the trunk as if it were the best part of themselves, they put their feet down and climbing from branch to branch they conquered another point of view, a wider horizon.
This book collects a hundred portraits of women who climb trees. They are anonymous photographs, that date from the end of the 19th century to the 1970s. The unknown faces intertwine with the voices of important women such as Louisa May Alcott, Simone de Beauvoir, Voltairine de Cleyre, Astrid Lindgren, Beah E. Richards, Bianca Di Beaco. They form a picture of real lives linked to unknown destinies portrayed on paper and together tell the story of women’s emancipation. Destinies that remind our « sisters », friends, daughters, grandchildren that we must learn to climb trees if we want to change the world. Still nowadays. And if someone invites us to put our feet on earth, the answer is and will be only one: « I won’t come down ».