NÀRAMI SA MANDRA, JUNE 10, 2022
On June 10 at 6:30 PM, at Sa Mandra, Nàrami doubles up, but there will be only one topic. Giovanni Follesa will chat with Joan-Elies Adell about his book, “We are family, stories of civil unions”. Marco Ceraglia with Familiae will present a new chapter of his family portraits.
Follesa, journalist and writer, tells in this latest work, published by Janus, the story of twelve Sardinian couples who, following the approval of Law 76/2016, the so-called Cirinnà Law, decide to get married. A necessary book that, thanks to the author’s curious complicity, tells stories of life, bonds, affection, and love. These are intimate, private, personal stories but equally public and political. These are stories of choices, struggles, claims, and taking positions. These are stories of ordinary normality that tell of love in all its nuances. These are daily tales that are disarming in their normality; each couple, each family is unique and not for this reason different or diverse. Giovanni Follesa takes and allows himself to be taken by the hand, entering with grace and poetry into life projects that, thanks to a law, albeit incomplete, have managed to give dignity and protection to those who lived discriminated against, in hiding, and in bigoted invisibility. We are family, a book to read, to meditate on, and to spread.
Marco Ceraglia’s “Familiae” project was born in December 2014, when civil unions and de facto couples had no certain legal reference. Only words, rivers of words, that political forces transformed into bills in search of abstruse compromises to define a possible and clear legal framework. At that time, precise images were enough to define reality. Photography can sometimes do more than a thousand words. Five composed Familiae, families in the plural, dressed up, fresh from the hairdresser, had themselves portrayed by Marco Ceraglia, witnessing their existence beyond any discrimination and denial. Today some of them have legal recognition, others are still fighting to widen the
narrow meshes of a law born from compromise.
Marco Ceraglia’s photos, like Giovanni Follesa’s words, remind us that reality is far ahead of social conventions and politics. The models of Familiae are multiple and increasingly new: there are those without children, those with two parents and single parents, those reconstructed, those extended, those married, or de facto, as the portraits on display suggest to us. It is only love that unites them all, and love by its very nature has no gender connotation, much less sex.