The Other: A Familiar Story by Maria D. Rapicavoli (Dec.1-31)

The Other: A Familiar Story
Video installation by Maria D. Rapicavoli (in Italian with English subtitles)
Curator: Teresa Fiore

City Hall of Agrigento, Piazza Pirandello, 1 – Multimedia room (inside the atrium on the right)
December 1-31, 2025 Hours: Mon-Fri 10am-6pm Saturday 10am-1pm
Guided tour: date to be confirmed
Info: tinyurl.com/VideoRapicavoli

Through an experimental narrative, the film tells the journey to the United States of the protagonist, a Sicilian woman forced to emigrate to the USA with an imposed arranged marriage, leaving behind a partner and her children. As such, the woman becomes “other” both with respect to the world she comes from and that of Lawrence, Massachusetts, in which she finds herself living after crossing the ocean. The theme of the video is highly relevant to the Agrigento 2025 dossier, entitled “The Self, the Other and Nature: Cultural Relations and Transformations” and places emphasis on the gender issue, in a province characterized by strong emigration, including female emigration, both in the past and today.

This work by Maria Rapicavoli is inspired by the words of Simone de Beauvoir in the 1949 essay “La donna like other:” its opening to the public takes place only one week after the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on November 25, established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1999.

The other: A familiar story is an installation included in the SPONDE project, within Agrigento Capital of Culture 2025, with the support of the Ministry of Culture, the Agrigento Capitale Foundation, the Sicilian Region, the Municipality of Agrigento, and the Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies at Montclair State University.