Rome is hosting a provocative temporary exhibition that reexamines patriarchy by imagining a future where gender equality has finally been achieved. Through artifacts from “2025,” it invites visitors to confront how sexism still shapes Italian society today.
A temporary exhibition on patriarchy in Rome showcases sexist paradigms in Italy’s male-dominated and macho society, where gender equality “is a distant prospect.”
It is the year 2148 and women and men are equal: Rome’s temporary “Museum of the Patriarchy” looks back from the future to highlight the gender gap.
Pink and blue payslips from 2025 illustrate gender pay inequality, while a schoolbook exercise places mothers in the kitchen and fathers at work, and the sound of women being catcalled plays over a loudspeaker.
Put on by charity ActionAid, the five-day exhibit says it intends to be “a journey through artefacts, relics, and works representative of patriarchal Italian society from the 20th and 21st centuries.”
A red dress, scrawled with the controlling questions “Where are you?” and “Who are you with?”, is a centerpiece of the exhibition, which runs until Tuesday, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
“The idea is that we’re looking at artefacts from 2025 through the eyes of someone living in 2148,” Alice Grecchi, media relations officer for ActionAid Italy, told AFP.
That is the year in which gender equality will finally be achieved, according to the latest World Economic Forum report on the gender gap.
The exhibition is based on research by ActionAid and the independent Pavia Observatory, which found that “violence against women is the result of structural inequalities rooted in everyday life,” whether at home, at work, in public spaces, on public transportation, or in the digital sphere.
The results offer “a snapshot of a country where violence is normalized, where gender equality is a distant prospect, and where there is a vast gap between formal and real equality,” researcher Isabella Orfano told AFP.
Femicide
A man in an armchair watches television with several empty beer bottles on a table in front of him, while beside him, a multitasking mother works, cleans, and looks after a child.
The scene, recreated using mannequins, “may seem absurd today, but in 2025, it represented the normality of domestic life,” explains the label accompanying the artwork, titled “Roles.”
A little further on, three punched cupboard doors hang on display.
“Here, we have depicted violence within homes… through the traces left on houses, walls, doors,” Grecchi said.
“Anger that leaves marks that are invisible from the outside, but are very real.”
Nearly a third of Italian women aged 16 to 75 have been victims of at least one act of physical or sexual violence, according to a preliminary report published Friday by the National Institute of Statistics (Istat).
Gender stereotypes remain deeply entrenched in Italy, a predominantly Catholic country, while violence against women frequently makes headlines.
In one of the exhibition rooms, a projector displays the names of women from among more than 80 victims of femicide recorded so far this year in Italy by the “Non Una di Meno” (Not One Less) movement.
By Juliette RABAT / AFP
Comments