All-around identity

We decided to make a selection of books devoted to the theme of identity, thanks to the reflections inspired by the beautiful book by Paola Favoino A Je Burnnesh. 

Starting from the Albanian Burnneshe and some other books, such as Giulia Iacolutti’s Casa Azul, in which identity can be considered as belonging to a gender -not necessarily identical with biological sex, this idea can expand and welcome heterogeneous meanings. An important role in its definition is played by the body, crucial in the works of Alessia Bernardini, Emile Hallard and Alix Marie, which give back a vision without stereotypes, or in the book I want to disappear by Mafalda Rakos, which tells about the anorexia of 20 young girls. Identity can also coincide with a gaze looking back to investigate its roots, as in the books of Alba Zari and Maria Kapajva, devoted, in a different way, to the father’s figure, or in the book by Cristina Ferraiuolo about the women of her hometown, Naples.

Also included in the selection are -among the others- books that document the encounter and the discovery of the other through the camera, as Ramya, by Petra Stavast, Queen Ann ps Belly cut off by Mariken Wessels, Peter’s book by Collier Schorre, and Jenny Jenny by Tobias Zielony. Further widening our gaze, identity is also the way in which we relate to the outside, the filters we adopt or the masks we wear to return to a more or less altered image of us, an idea behind books like Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: behind the mask, another mask, connected to the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and Maskirowska, also by Tobias Zielony.