Femina Sapiens

Femina Sapiens is a photographic project that calls for feminine knowledge related to the land and ancestry. The work is located in the Sierra de Tramontana in Mallorca.

The starting point is personal, positioned and individual – my interest in the Sierra de la Tramontana in Mallorca – but, currently, I have broadened the scope and challenges an entire community. Women are the protagonists of an experiential knowledge that connects with the body and nature in its purest state.

Over the years I have developed a very strong bond with the Sierra de Tramontana, a landscape where I go hiking and which is characterized by a very special vegetation and way of building: the “dry stone”. Since I started walking along its routes and paths, I was aware of the energy, the magic and the connection I felt with the mountains, the trees, the fauna, the historical vestiges and, above all, the rocks. I had the need to photograph it, to capture how the landscape communicated with me and, later, to share it: I contacted other women to express together in images the relationship of interdependence with nature. A relationship based on instinct, experience, touch, attentive listening to what each rock and each plant has to say.

The result is a series of black and white photographs that build a double story, biographical and choral: on the one hand, I portray corners of the landscape and my own feeling towards nature and ruins loaded with history; on the other, I invite colleagues of any age, body shape and condition to show their bond and motivation with the place that welcomes them. Feelings of freedom, expansion, intimacy, seclusion, union or sorority arise when walking barefoot through the earth and agreeing on the same journey.

On an aesthetic level, the images translate into a dark universe, loaded with textures and an eclectic symbology. Animals, rites, access keys, shells, cracks, rocks and more rocks... My intention is to transport the viewer to enigmatic and atmospheric settings in which they can experience that feeling that Tanizaki described "that the air in those places contains a thickness of silence, that in that darkness reigns an eternally unalterable serenity..."