Elisa Caroli, Valeria Carrieri, Cecilia Valagussa, BAD G AND THE UNICORN, 2023

This publication is freely inspired by the cycle of six tapestries referred to as The Dame and the Unicorn and kept at National Museum of the Middle Ages of Cluny in Paris. According to one of the most accredited interpretations, the cycle, created in Flanders at the end of the 16th century, represents the path to enlightenment through the five senses. In the last tapestry the inscription A mon seul desir appears to depict the sixth sense, home of the heart and of desire understood as free will. In her Memoir Simone de Beauvoir recounts that in 1947 – while she was going through a creative block – she went to see the Cluny cycle. It was not long after that she had the revelation that would be the starting point of The Second Sex: “This world was a masculine world, my childhood had been nourished by myths forged by men and I hadn’t react to them in at all the same way I should have done if I had been a boy. I was so interested in this discovery that I abbandoned my project for a personal confession in order to give all my attention to the condition of women in general”. The authors decided to start from here to interpret the iconography of the Lady and the Unicorn and compose a delirious hymn starring girls that just wanna have fun, unicorns, flowers, plants, feminism, myths, magical beliefs, psychotropic substances, desires, sixth senses, sense of humor, rivers of tears and other body fluids!