In her rooms
curated by Erik Kessels
From the idea of giving a woman back her nakedness, of untying the body from sexual objectification, arose the need to undertake an investigation of the rooms where the discovery of ourselves takes place, in our moments of freedom and intimacy – like Virigina Woolf rightly writes in hes essay A room of his own (1929). Met on the streets of New York, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Manchester, Paris, Valencia, Marseille, Milan and Rome almost all the portraied women are non-native to the place where they were photographed and mixed raced, queer, non binary. Beyond any established scheme, the only criterion that led her in this research was her own empathy towards the outside, which allowed her to grasp the essence of a new international and global female feeling, underlining the fact of a strong female transmigration.
Maria Clara Macrì from 2018 began traveling the world to meet women from other cultures who, crossing her lonely destiny, would have been available to take part in her photographic project. Whether it was Milan or Paris, London, New York or Los Angeles, what mattered for Maria Clara Macrì was to be able to fully grasp and visually express the complex and intense nature of today’s femininity, destroying stereotypes and freeing the image of woman from sexualization and from the objectification of which she is a victim.
Thus was born the In Her Rooms project, in which Maria Clara explores the relationship between empathy, intimacy and the contemporary representation of women. The photographer chose to portray her subjects within her own bedrooms, seeing each of those rooms as a safe space in which women can experience and discover their own identity for the first time. The result is a series of portraits which, with girls from all cultures and walks of life, reflects the uniqueness of women. Entirely shot on film “In Her Rooms” is also a collection of stories, poems and aphorisms that Maria Clara wrote in her diaries during her journey from one room to another.
