Items where Year is 2025

Franca Donda (Italy, 1933-2017) was an activist, filmmaker, and photographer who lived in Caracas for most part of the second half of the twentieth century. During these decades, she made several short films with the Venezuelan collectives Cine Urgente/Urgent Cinema (1968-1973) and Grupo Feminista Miércoles/Wednesday’s Feminist Group (1979-1988). Throughout her life, she also took thousands of photographs of women across Latin America. However, her work has received little scholarly attention, and her archive has not been properly preserved. This article demonstrates the importance of protecting the legacy of Donda, Cine Urgente, and Grupo Feminista Miércoles. To do so, it explores Donda’s multifaceted identity and outlines the production of the two collectives. It maps, locates, and assesses the conditions of some of the materials that could comprise their archive. And it reflects on issues of positionality and briefly describes the transmedia project that is emerging from this research.

Elsa Schiaparelli was well known for her collaborations with avant-garde artists, particularly those associated with the surrealist movement, however previous research has rarely discussed her relationship with the artist Leonor Fini. Between 1937-1940, Fini produced several designs for Schiaparelli, comprising three fashion illustrations and the bottle for the couturier’s perfume. Focusing on these illustrations, this article examines how Fini’s artistic aesthetic, particularly her use of animal-human hybrids, complemented and amplified the surrealist elements in Schiaparelli’s designs at this time. Capitalizing on the increasing popularity of surrealist imagery in contemporary fashion magazine publication, Fini and Schiaparelli both used the image of the woman-animal hybrid to evoke a sense of unease in contemporary audiences in a way that reflected deeper cultural tensions. These illustrations were a site of exchange between the two women, with a lasting influence on the Schiaparelli brand and on Fini’s ongoing artistic practice.