Lucia
Ronchetti

PRESENTATION
Letizia Battaglia worked as a photojournalist for the Palermo newspaper L'Ora from 1974 to 1991, during one of the most tragic periods of contemporary Italian history, the so-called Anni di piombo. In those years, Palermo had turned into a field of civil war. The Corleonesi clan, the hegemonic faction within the Sicilian Mafia, assassinated governors, policemen, activists, journalists, and entire Mafia families from rival clans. Letizia Battaglia's images for the newspaper punctuated the relentless calendar of daily massacres and testified how the city's public spaces had become a theatre of blood and horror.
In Maria Stepanova's vision, this period is interpreted as a journey into the Palermo’s underworld and staged in a virtual Sicilian Greek theatre, with musical, textual and formal aspects taken from the tradition of Euripides' tragedy.
The photographer and activist Letizia Battaglia, interpreted by a Solo female violist travels through the underworld of Palermo and meets the dead of that period and in particular 5 women who suffered the violence of the murder of their husbands and children, torn by grief and forced into silence during their lives.
The women discuss their personal tragedies with the Letizia Battaglia in instrumental form, in a composite narrative that condemns violence, generating a multi-dialogue between the sung voice and instrumental melodies generated by the soloist.
Maria Stepanova creates a dialogue made up of instrumental interrogations that cannot be verbalised but are received by the women of Palermo who react to the silence imposed on them during their lives and speak out a Sartrian "theatre of actuality", evoking the desperation of the vanquished, with the aim of shedding light on the suffering brought about by armed conflict.
The Violist Battaglia is accompanied on her journey by a positive hero, a Sicilian intellectual, poet or judge, brutally murdered by the mafia,  who explains and narrates to her the expanded Underworld and who helps her to fix and transcribe in the form of photos or written reports what each woman she meets tells her.