Hän

One day in August 2019 I saw Mirò for the first time. Slender, she walked towards me among the stones and with her arms outstretched she tried to keep her balance. Neaeby, a plant made the same gesture as Mirò. We were along the borderline between genders, both listening, to give voice and shape to our male souls. For a while, we lived together in that liminoid space of free subversion, of ourselves and of society.

Mirò once explained to me that it was on his chest that he felt his male part strongly. With his hand resting there, he told me that his body had changed as he started following the head and achieved the desired androgyny. His concept of beauty did not correspond to that of others: the round face of well-being, the reassuring prosperous breasts, the voluminous hair and then the floral skirt, the smile of circumstance. All fake things, he said.

I started the project when he said to me: “The point is: what can I do within my means, with the body that I have?” At that time, Mirò seemed to slowly change before my eyes. fast: they were flashes, intuitions, phrases broken by fear, stammered, they were splinters shot off by reflections on his and others' experiences, the result of reading or encounters. Under the skin, however, the urgency of life continued to shake mind and body.

Then the lockdown closes us. The space of subversion materially becomes the home. Time slows down. Mirò - a biological woman of neutral gender - shaves her hair, finds the courage to be called Mirò and experiences the possibility of speaking in a neutral language with a language, Italian, which does not include the neutral. A journey, his, which is still in progress.

"Hän" is a project on gender identity. The title is inspired by the Finnish language: hän is the only singular personal pronoun existing in the Finnish language. Finnish is in fact a completely gender neutral language. This allows the promotion of a culture of respect and total acceptance of each person, free from the social conventions imposed that deny the infinite possibilities of self expression.