Francesca Todde, IUZZA. Goliarda Sapienza, 2024

IUZZA by Francesca Todde tells the story of an encounter, a night sea crossing in search of Goliarda Sapienza. “Iuzza” is the loving childhood nickname given to the writer back in Sicily, where she comes to world in 1924. The crooked symmetry betwee her biography and work is filled with invisible presences: the vigor of her literary adventure resembles a treasure salvaged from a wreckage.
Starting from Sapienza’s novels, poems, short stories, letters, and personal records, IUZZA unravels as an intimate journey triggered by antagonistic forces, subverting the nature of forms and turning words into images. The sequence of images consists of seven sections that operate through temporal displacement, textual references, and concatenated events. Each part originates from an indirect dialogue with its own absence, as a sort of telepathic exchange through empty space aimed a magnifying the perception of emotional connections. Francesca Todde’s photographs are like inner landscapes, or animated spaces leaping across the blurred lines of memory. Her gaze through the lens seems to open on a deserted bustle, following faded footprints up to their origin, which is childish and ancestral, animal and mineral: these images are traces haunted by the feeling that body is everywhere.

(From the Afterword by Luca Reffo)