MANUAL OF HOW TO BECOME A GOOD GIRL - from 1 to 30 with zero expectations

THIS IS MY MANUAL ON HOW TO BECOME A GOOD GIRL, OR AT LEAST HOW TO SURVIVE UNTIL 30 AS A WOMAN OF AVERAGE BEHAVIOR. WHILE OBSERVING MY FAMILY ARCHIVE I STOPPED TO OBSERVE ON HOW THE HAND GESTURES CONSTANTLY UNDERLINE THE DAILY RELEVANT SITUATIONS.

I developed this project during the CURAE Masterclass with Erik Kessels this current  year. Born from a fanzine  I created a couple of years ago, with Erik we reasoned more deeply, I decided to create a real survival manual that follows a growth path regarding my person through the gestures of my hands, where the images follow a very precise timeline. Erik helped me to get out from the confort zone by pushing me where he knew he could, helping me to be honest and do an all inn with some images. The images, together with the passage of time, change, the realization changes, from the family archive we move on to photos taken by friends, self-portraits, photos from WhatsApp, Facebook and various hard drives, leading me to an obsessive search for images. I have seen tens of thousands of them, and I have chosen the gestures that best represented me through the years. The choice to start from childhood comes from the thought that as children we act based on instinct and not experience, and gestures are therefore already spontaneous and sometimes comical. As we grow, gestures become more conscious, less random, because they have a weight, a direction, since we are conditioned by experiences. That’s why sometimes the sentences that accompany the images are extremely didactic, descriptive and other times they are very ironic or dark.

I chose the observation of the hands as a symbol of what underlines our daily life.