Female voices: Di Massimo, De Gregorio, Moghaddam

From a personal interest in the size of the "Female" and the magical role of women in the arts, in society and in our families, at the Rome Art Week, I decided to interview three artists who have joined the project.
Through the words of Di Massimo Viola, Riviera De Gregorio and Neda Shafiee Moghaddam, you can reflect on what is today the "Female" and how art, and the search for these artists, can help to make us more aware than a topic never dull.

Di Massimo Viola
He lives and works in Rome, graduated in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in 1994, his artistic process highlights the sham existence through dreamlike elements, symbols and the discovery of unknown territories.

What, for you, the female?

The female is the Mother Earth on which and in which we live, but it is the male, is the story that we are doing, the struggle, the enterprise, the lost battle and also the won, it is to honor those who have lived before we carrying on small and large battles with conviction and devotion.

It is since 1986 that works on the theme of women, as it has evolved over time this result?

In that year I began to study the female nude searching for its shape, but a different form, new, certainly not in line with what was being proposed or rather imposed, as an icon, as a female model of the time. I was looking for a figure "feminine" that could be the contrast, which could make sense that normality is in diversity, that the differences make us unique. And no one can lay down the law on how it should be a body or a mind. Each of us should accept one's being (in both form and in thought), trying to resemble as much as possible to himself and not to someone else. This is a part of the research that I carry yet given that women (and also men), are still trapped in the aesthetics prison without realizing that it is not the best if you borrow the features or the thought of others. My belief is that developing your own being can refine his uniqueness.

In the press release of "The Way of the Stone and the Sacred Feminine ..." we are asked: "We are used to hearing the word feminine next to the sacred word, there may be something sacred even in a contemporary feminine?".
How did you respond to this question?

In that statement it was intended the viewer to follow different routes to get to "watching" a work of art, the transformation from the work thought. And this is the key word: transformation, the sacred feminine has always been linked with the great ability to transform the energies of the earth, nothing more sacred perhaps, but I firmly believe that now also the ability to turn is still a prerogative the feminine. In the works you have seen they are often represented black pearls: they are just the symbol of the transformations, as was the case in the alchemical vessel. Closed in the black spheres there are drops of life experience distilled and transformed thoroughly.

When one thinks of an emancipated and free woman, she often thinks of a woman with aggressive attitudes instead in your work always represents a very dreamlike and playful woman, you think it's important that she maintains this dimension?

If I think of a liberated woman and free thinking of a woman who married and welcomed with great openness changes that made other women who came before us, I can not imagine an aggressive woman. But I think a woman with firm eye to the present, aware that the only way you can have a better future. A woman with the desire to make further changes to those who come after. In my works you can see a dream world perhaps, but depends always from the soul of the beholder, actually believe in and beyond sign, shape or pigment, you can find everything: even the drama, the part "dark."


Riviera De Gregorio
Born in Termoli in 1985. He started his career as an actress and then extended his research in the field of performing arts and the visual arts, driven by the need to experience an artistic hybrid and nomadic path that based on the lack of definitions on his expressive code.
What, for you, the female?
Simone De Beauvoir asserted that "one is not born woman, one becomes one." Femininity or masculinity in fact have little to do with biology or psychiatry, as are mere social constructions aimed at maintaining order.