Electra

Violetta Bellocchio decided to disappear, erasing all traces of herself after a man had abused her on her way home. She cut all ties. She threw away her phones. The clothes she wore on TV ended up in the bins for used clothes. She made sure that no one would ever find her again. When a body suffers violence, it is no longer the same as before. The trauma disintegrates who we are, it changes our perception of ourselves and of the surrounding danger, to the point that we see distancing ourselves from our everyday life, now compromised, as the only way to salvation. This is the urgency that pushed Violetta to the undoing of her own identity. Her alter ego during that period was Barbara Genova, a name, a body with which she lived, worked and published for two years, far from her mother tongue, becoming a stranger. Barbara Genova allowed Violetta to return to the light, with private time and months of patient solitary work while her face changed and her nervous system repaired itself. But was it Barbara who invented today’s Violetta, or the other way around? What traces still live in her? In Electra, the transformation of pain into a struggle to regain control of her own self brings Violetta Bellocchio face to face with her readers, in the overwhelming story of her disappearance.