Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project © Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project © Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project View all images ↓
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«Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto» reflects on intergenerational memory, exploring how unspoken histories of violence and resilience continue to shape women’s lives in Italy today.

Project Description

«Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto» is a visual investigation that reclaims matrilineal memory as both resistance and reparation.

It emerges from the story of my great-grandmother, who escaped an attempted femicide in Sicily in 1939, at a time when the Codice Rocco still legitimized such crimes in the name of "honor". The project explores how gender-based violence leaves lasting traces not only in the body, but also in silence, gestures, and inherited emotional landscapes.

At its core, the work reimagines the family archive not as passive memory, but as an active, contested site, where histories can be rewritten, silences broken, and erased voices re-centered. Engaging with these materials becomes both personal and political: an act of reclamation against systems that have long controlled how women’s lives are told, remembered, or forgotten. The symbolism of zagara (engl. orange blossom) threads through the project as a sensorial metaphor. Traditionally tied to love, marriage, and purity, its fragrance here embodies contradiction: affection bound to duty, and beauty used to enforce control. What is meant to sanctify can also suffocate.

Although rooted in personal history, the projects gestures toward a broader emotional landscape, shaped by quiet inheritances and unspoken systems that extend beyond place or generation. By linking family history with collective memory, it highlights how gender-based violence persists across generations, even after legal reforms. Until 1981, Italian law still reduced sentences for men who killed wives, daughters, or sisters "to defend family honor." That legal framework may be abolished, but its cultural afterlife endures — in the silences within families, in Catholic archetypes of Madonna and Magdalene, and in media narratives that continue to frame femicides as "crimes of passion."

The present project honours the women who came before me not only for their resilience, but for the emotional labour they carried without recognition. It also acknowledges how certain forms of violence persist, not always visible, not always named, but deeply embedded in the fabric of everyday life. Rather than offering resolution, the work holds space for complexity. It moves through memory not to reconstruct a linear story, but to listen differently: to what resists clarity, to what persists.

Ultimately, «Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto» is not only a work of remembrance but a visual protest. It confronts structures that define, constrain, and erase women, while reclaiming photography as a practice of care and resistance. By intervening in archives and opening space for new voices, it asks how memory can become a tool of both survival and transformation.

[The captions take the form of my field notes — fragments of inner dialogue, questions, and encounters that shaped the work. They weave together personal anecdotes, obstacles faced as a woman, and reflections from conversations or research, from family silences to legal philosophy. In this way, they position me inside the project, acknowledging that inquiry is never neutral but entangled with memory, vulnerability, and discovery.]

Motivational Statement

My background in law shapes the way I work with photography: as a field where power, memory, and representation collide. Laws may be reformed, but their afterlives remain present — in culture, in language, in the ways women are still seen and judged. Through this work, I ask how those traces can be confronted and reimagined visually.

With this work, I want to expand a deeply personal starting point into a broader inquiry on how gender-based violence is remembered and represented, in Italy and beyond. It is both an act of care and a form of resistance — holding space for complexity, while questioning the narratives that continue to constrain women’s lives.

The PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant would would not only support the ongoing development of the project, including further archival and field research, but would also allow me to strengthen this dialogue internationally — to bring the work into new contexts of exhibition, exchange, and visibility. What motivates me most is the possibility that a story once silenced can contribute to a collective conversation, amplifying voices that risk being erased.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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1939: my great-grandmother ran. Not from a stranger, but from her own family. The law would have forgiven them for killing her. They would have called it “honor.”

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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I think about what it means to inherit silence. It isn’t a story passed down, it isn’t something you can touch. It’s an absence. A gap. A weight you feel without being told.Her silence shaped the women who came after her — my nonna, my mother, me. I didn’t receive her words, but I live with what she didn’t say. Sometimes that feels louder than anything she could have spoken.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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My grandmother carried the stigma of her mother, an inherited wound that shaped her live. These unchosen memories linger like a haunting scent, passed down through generations and embedded in cultural trauma. Yet, they also reveal the resilience of women who, despite being cast out, transformed pain into strength, forging new identities from fragmented pasts.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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Sometimes I feel guilty. Guilty for bringing her story into the open, for making work about what she chose not to tell. Am I betraying her? Or am I breaking the cycle by refusing the silence that suffocated her? The line between remembering and exposing feels thin. I move back and forth across it every time I work on this project.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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Women are celebrated as mothers — almost sacred, placed on a pedestal. But as soon as they step outside that role, they are diminished, ignored, or punished. Reverence and violence coexist in the same breath.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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Two photographs my great-grandmother received in secret from my great-grandfather after their forced separation. Speaking with my grandmother about them, I asked how old she was when she was taken from her mother and sent to an orphanage with her brothers. She answered: «I was 18 months old, still a picciridda» — the Sicilian word for “little girl.”

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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I often think about how much religion shaped my nonna’s life. She grew up in a world where women were divided into roles — pure like the Virgin Mary or marked like Mary Magdalene. It was never about choice, it was about survival inside those categories. For her, these ideas were not abstract. They were the framework she inherited, the rules she lived by, the language that defined her worth.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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Violence is not always somewhere distant, in other families, in other stories. Sometimes it is closer than you think. Even within my own family there are wounds I cannot speak of. Close enough to remind me that the idea of family as a safe space is fragile. The violence is real, yet I cannot expose it.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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My cousin wants to be a surgeon. But she tells me it’s almost impossible — women rarely make it that far. She says it like a fact, not a complaint. A dream measured against a ceiling she has already learned to see. It feels quiet, invisible, but this is how violence works too: not only in blows or words, but in the way desire is cut down before it can grow.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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So I wonder: can abolishing a law ever undo the damage it has already done? Or do we always live with its afterlife — in memory, in bodies, in family stories? The honor article may no longer exist in Italian law, but its shadow still governs how women are seen, judged, remembered.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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My grandmother carried the stigma of being the daughter of a “shameless” woman. My grandfather’s father opposed their union, fearing the shadow of dishonor. But my grandfather forced a choice: accept their marriage or he would leave for Venezuela with her if it was refused. This ultimatum broke through resistance. Their wedding photograph marks not only a union, but a rupture with tradition.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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My great-grandmother's escape was a silent refusal. Today, silence is no longer enough. Remembering her story is not only a way to honour survival, but also a way to confront the systems that still make women's lives precarious. Each act of remembrance and each refusal to consider gender-based violence as 'normal' becomes part of a broader resistance.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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The family archive is full of photographs, but none of them say anything about what happened. The archive itself is complicit — it preserves what is acceptable and erases what is unbearable. When I hold these pictures, I feel her absence more strongly than her presence. I search for cracks, for details, for something unintentional that slipped through. But what I find is silence printed on paper.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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I keep returning to Article 587 of the Codice Rocco. The delitto d’onore. For decades it told Italian men that their honor was worth more than a woman’s life. When the law was abolished in 1981, it disappeared from the code — but not from the culture that had already internalized its logic.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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I feel trapped between roles. Italy still forces women into the binary of saint or sinner, Madonna or whore. I resist it, but it seeps into me anyway.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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When I told my mother about this project, her worry deepened. She fears not only for my safety in the streets, but for the consequences of the work itself. She imagines me crossing paths with people I shouldn’t — men tied to families with power, with histories of violence. She fears that by exposing what happened, I might provoke anger, resentment, revenge.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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There are patterns in how the media tells these stories. Some cases are treated like thrillers, with endless speculation and morbid fascination. Others are reported as routine, reduced to clichés about “sick love” or “too much passion,” disappearing into the news cycle within a day.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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The man with the beautiful eyes had made her dream of a fairy-tale wedding. A wedding, however, that within a few months turned into a nightmare. A nightmare that then lasted for years. Paula's story is that of so many women who dream of love, a family, stability, and who instead find themselves dealing with the idea of possession, beatings, prevarication.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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The delitto d'onore persists as a kind of social ghost, surviving even when the statute disappeared by remaining present in the silences of families, in gestures of vigilance, in reputational fears and in the ways women still monitor themselves under the collective gaze of others.

© Tiziana Amico - Image from the Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto photography project
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In Greek myth, lilies were born from Hera’s milk — symbols of purity and divine femininity. Here they rot, collapsing into themselves. Their decay reminds me of how ideals of purity are imposed on women: celebrated at first, then left to wither under the weight of expectation.

Zagara—Ogni fiore porta il profumo del suo segreto by Tiziana Amico

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