Fondazione ICA Milano presents, from 18 January to 6 March 2022, the project The Other: A Familiar Story, conceived by Maria D. Rapicavoli and commissioned by The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation of New York for the 8th Floor, in collaboration with Westfälischer Kunstverein , Münster.

Project realized thanks to the support of the Italian Council (6th Edition, 2019), program of international promotion of Italian art of the General Direction for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. The Other: A Familiar Story traces, through a multimedia installation, the vicissitudes of a Sicilian woman who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, is forced to leave her land and children to follow her husband to the United States. Taking a cue from a true story handed down orally by the women of her family, Maria D. Rapicavoli builds a work on historical and personal memory and on the use of imagination as the only escape mechanism from the lived context, dealing with issues such as those related to gender violence , abuse, alienation, dislocation, invisibility and migration.

The story, which follows a timeless and bewildering rhythm, is interspersed with flashbacks and slow-motion images that refer to mental rather than physical geographies. The shooting of the video on two channels, made in the places where the woman really lived, return an intimate setting that traces the psychological journey undertaken by the protagonist through the patriarchal social structure of the time.

The narrative follows the path of a deliberately unnamed protagonist, forced by society to marry her rapist and then follow him to the United States by moving to Lawrence MA, near Boston. He will find himself working in one of the textile factories that at the time gave work to millions of Italians who emigrated to America, and then personally took part in the famous 1912 "Bread and Roses" strike in Lawrence MA, marking an important chapter in the conquest civil rights of workers and women.