Laura Leonelli, I won’t come down, 2023

For centuries women have remained at the foot of trees. Women-roots, destined to nurture the fruits of other existences, fathers, husbands, sons, that eternally free male who instead climbs every tree, and from above looks far, grows, conquers. It seemed like an eternal condemnation, the worst because it was blessed by all power, and instead some women rebelled and embraced the trunk as if it were the best part of themselves, put their feet up and climbing from branch to branch reached another point of view, broader, more open. This book collects a hundred portraits of women in trees. They are anonymous photographs, from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. They are unfamiliar faces interwoven with the voices of such important women as Louisa May Alcott, Simone de Beauvoir, Voltairine de Cleyre, Astrid Lindgren, Beah E. Richards, and Bianca Di Beaco. Together they are real and paper fates that tell the story of women’s empowerment and remind our “sisters,” friends, daughters, granddaughters that we must learn to climb trees if we want to change the world. Even today. And if someone invites us to return to the ground, the answer is and will be only one: “I am not coming down.” “Women climb trees when they disobey. And every woman who disobeys is the daughter of the first, most celebrated and damned of the disobedient: Eve. Listening to the voices of the new Eve, from the 12th century to the present, this book reports on the leaps, disappointments, struggles, and ascents of some of them–mystics, writers, philosophers, photographers, ecologists, entrepreneurs, mountaineers–who disobeyed and climbed the tree of consciousness and self-realization.” – Laura Leonelli

The volume, produced thanks to the support of Corali Group, comes out Oct. 13, on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition of the same name in Bergamo, as part of Fotografica – Festival of Photography, from Oct. 14 to Nov. 19, 2023.
The exhibition, curated by Laura Leonelli and produced for Fotografica with the support of Grazia Corali, entrepreneur and president of Gruppo Corali, presents a wide selection of anonymous photographs that from the late 19th century to the 1970s, from Europe to the United States, confirm the international popularity of a new character, the woman who climbs a tree. In the exhibition layout and accompanying volume, the anonymous images alternate with the testimonies of important women who, by climbing branches, ideally or physically for more than a century, have suggested a different destiny.