"The Other: A Familiar Story," is a one-channel video based on a true story passed down orally by the women of the artist's family.

FROM THE DIRECTOR

“Maria D. Rapicavoli’s work explores conditions and experiences of power, gender violence, migration, alienation, invisibility, and displacement through a critique of global socio-economic and political systems.

Her works call into question dominant historical narratives, disrupting perceived notions of the post-war era with her investigations into the materiality of evidence and the status of knowledge. She seeks to make tangible how social, economic, political, and military structures of power, taking place out of sight, impact our everyday lives. Drawing on her native Sicily as a place of departure and arrival, she explores the sea and the sky as sites of transit where individual narratives intersect with international politics. She explores conditions of mobility through a range of topics: an intimate family lore, the Mediterranean Sea and the tragedy of migratory flows and political refugees, military drone operations, and airspace delineation.

Her recent work, "The Other: A Familiar Story," 2022, is a one-channel video based on a true story passed down orally by the women of the artist's family. The work revolves around historical and personal memory and the imaginary as the only escape mechanism from everyday life and raises issues related to gender violence, abuse, alienation, dislocation, invisibility, and migration. The work portrays the struggles of not only the lone Sicilian woman featured on screen but all migrant women, past and present, who must navigate patriarchal societies hostile to newcomers.”

-Maria D. Rapicavoli