{"id":213199,"date":"2025-12-03T10:03:20","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T15:03:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/?p=213199"},"modified":"2026-04-08T13:02:02","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T17:02:02","slug":"laltro-a-una-storia-familiare-di-maria-d-rapicavoli-a-cura-di-teresa-fiore-dicembre-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/2025\/12\/03\/laltro-a-una-storia-familiare-di-maria-d-rapicavoli-a-cura-di-teresa-fiore-dicembre-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"The Other: A Familiar Story by Maria D. Rapicavoli, edited by Teresa Fiore"},"content":{"rendered":"

THE OTHER: A FAMILIAR STORY<\/strong> by Maria D. Rapicavoli, edited by Teresa Fiore
\nTwo-channel video installation (color and with audio, duration: 20 minutes) \u00a0TRAILERS<\/a><\/span><\/strong>
\nLocation: City Hall of Agrigento, Piazza Pirandello, 1 – Multimedia room (inside the atrium on the right)
\nDuration: December 1-31, 2025 Hours: Mon-Fri 10am-6pm Saturday 10am-1pm
\nGuided tour: date to be confirmed<\/p>\n

Through an experimental narrative, the film tells the journey to the United States of the protagonist, a Sicilian woman forced to emigrate to the USA with an imposed arranged marriage, leaving behind a partner and her children. As such, the woman becomes “other” both with respect to the world she comes from and that of Lawrence, Massachusetts, in which she finds herself living after crossing the ocean. The theme of the video is highly relevant to the Agrigento 2025 dossier, entitled “The Self, the Other and Nature: Cultural Relations and Transformations” and places emphasis on the gender issue, in a province characterized by strong emigration, including female emigration, both in the past and today.<\/p>\n

Maria Rapicavoli’s video work is an adaptation of the real story of a relative of hers, whose micro-history as “other” is intertwined with the US macro-history at the time of the Spanish flu epidemic and the great strikes that redefined the concept of work in the 20th century. From a philosophical point of view, Rapicavoli’s work is inspired by the words of Simone de Beauvoir in the essay “Woman as Other” which serves as the introduction to The Second Sex, a revolutionary book published in 1949: “It is not the Other who, by defining itself as Other, defines the One; the Other is posited as Other by the One positing itself as One. But in order for the Other not to turn into the One, the Other has to submit to this foreign point of view.\u201d<\/p>\n

Created in 2020, the two-channel version of the video had an extremely limited audience due to the impact of COVID on the art world, although it was screened in prestigious spaces. This installation in Agrigento therefore has a key role in making the video in the original version accessible to a wide and varied audience, for the first time in Italy and in particular in Sicily, which is one of the two locations of the story.<\/p>\n

The opening of the installation takes place only a week after the International Day to Eradicate Violence Against Women <\/a>in November 2025, a day at the General Assembly at the United Nations in 1999.<\/p>\n

THE OTHER: A FAMILIAR STORY is a video installation included in the project called SPONDE<\/a>, as part of Agrigento Capitale della Cultura 2025<\/a>, with the support of the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Fondazione Agrigento Capitale, the Sicilian Region, the Municipality of Agrigento, and the Inserra Chair<\/a> in Italian and Italian American Studies at 星空无限传媒 University.<\/p>\n

\"Logo<\/a> \u00a0<\/a> <\/a><\/a>\"logo<\/a>\"MiC_logo_esteso_BLU\" \u00a0<\/a><\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n

The work was initially commissioned by The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, exhibited in collaboration with Westf\u00e4lischer Kunstverein, and supported by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism (now MIC) within the Italian Council Program.<\/p>\n

Resources<\/strong>
\nFurther information on this video<\/a>
\nMaria Rapicavoli’s official site <\/a>
\nMaria Rapicavoli’s I<\/a>nstagram<\/a>
\nSPONDE <\/a>project<\/p>\n

\n
\"Maria<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>
\n

Maria D. Rapicavoli was born in Catania and lives and works in New York. She obtained a Master’s degree in Art from Goldsmiths University in London (2005) and a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania (2001). She participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2012. In 2024 she was an Artist Fellow at the Swiss Institute of Rome. In 2023\/24 she taught as an artist at the Children’s Museum of the Arts in New York. <\/p><\/div><\/p><\/div>\n

She has exhibited in several group exhibitions (The High Line, New York; ICAMilano; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; Westf\u00e4lischer Kunstverein, M\u00fcnster; Magazzino Arte Italiana, Cold Spring, NY; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, New York; Villa Croce Museum, Genoa; Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin; Villa Croce Museum, Genoa; Palazzo Reale, Milan; Riso, Museum of Contemporary Art, Palermo; Palazzo Strozzi Foundation, Florence; Italian Cultural Institute in London and New York). She has received numerous awards and scholarships, including the Italian Council Award VI edition (2019); New York Award – The Italian Institute and the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, New York (2021). For years she has been an associate artist at the prestigious Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York. For more information, see Maria Rapicavoli<\/a>‘s complete profile.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>

\nTeresa Fiore<\/a> holds the Inserra Chair of Italian Studies and Italo-American Studies at 星空无限传媒 University (New Jersey, USA). She has also taught at Harvard, Yale and NYU. She is the author of the book Pre-occupied Spaces: A remapping of transnational migrations and Italian colonial legacies (Mondadori\/Le Monnier 2021), which also addresses the topics of the Italian diaspora and gender, and of numerous articles on migration to and from Italy. In 2019 she was awarded the title of Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy for her work in cultural diplomacy between Italy and the USA through a regular calendar of events(montclair.edu\/inserra-chair<\/a>). She is currently working on a project on food practices during the Allied landing in Sicily in 1943 (Food, Hunger and Migration<\/a>) and a project on the cultural representation of adoption (Adoption Studies Project<\/a>). For Agrigento Capital of Culture 2025, she coordinated four programs within the project SPONDE <\/a>(a program on the SBARCO\/Landing<\/a> of the Allies in Sicily in 1943, a project of digital research on the Scala dei Turchi<\/a>, an exhibit about the Italian citizenship law<\/a> e videoinstallation about emigration and gender<\/a>)<\/span><\/div><\/span><\/div>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE OTHER: A FAMILIAR STORY by Maria D. Rapicavoli, edited by Teresa Fiore Two-channel video installation (color and with audio, duration: 20 minutes) \u00a0 Location: City Hall of Agrigento, Piazza Pirandello, 1 – Multimedia room (inside the atrium on the right) Duration: December 1-31, 2025 Hours: Mon-Fri 10am-6pm Saturday 10am-1pm Guided tour: date to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":213201,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,23,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-20_chss-news","category-7_homepage-news-and-events","category-230_inserra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213199"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":213358,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213199\/revisions\/213358"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}