The Angel of the Hearth – L’ angelo del focolare

One day, within a family, the husband’s routine violence against his wife escalates into femicide. The man kills her by crushing her head with an iron. The woman lies dead on the floor. But her death is not enough; nobody believes it, and so the woman—a grotesque figure—is forced to get up and return to her former routine. To clean the house, prepare meals for her son and husband, and care for her elderly mother-in-law. Every morning, her family finds her dead, yet because no one believes it, the woman endlessly gets up. Again. And she endures her husband’s violence, her son’s depression, and the helplessness of her mother-in-law, who not only fails to condemn her brutal and tyrannical son but actually pities him. Every evening, the woman dies again, trapped in a circle of Hell where the torment never ends.

“Emma Dante’s work goes beyond denunciation,” wrote Il Manifesto. “Beyond the sheer power of the direct representation of violence right before the spectator’s eyes, thanks to repetition, the Palermo artist transforms the action into a ritual. She brings to light the mythical substrate underlying the tragedy.”