Respect. Stop Violence against women.

Respect. Stop Violence against women is a project in favor of gender equality created for the Italian statistical institute Censis with the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, Department for Equal Opportunities. The project result is a book/exhibition, made up of three different parts: Rspct (“Respect”), is the main report of the research carried out by Censis which also acts as an introduction to all the work; followed by Bd’I (“Bellezze d’Italia”, Beauties of Italy) and Adm (“Atlante della Misogenia”, Atlas of misogyny), two visual investigations on the theme of misogyny made by photographer Alessandro Scotti.

In Bellezze d’Italia, the theme of gender gap is investigated through a gallery of pictorial images inspired by the biblical episode of Susanna and the Elders. An episode narrated by Daniele, the prophet, where two elderly judges threaten to denounce the young Susanna of adultery if he is not granted them. She refuses to be blackmailed and she is arrested and put to death for promiscuity when the young Daniel interrupts the proceedings and save her.
Selecting over 100 Italian artists from 1300 to 1900 and cutting out and re-associating their paintings, a huge scene is created that represent the evolution of man-woman relationships and the perception of femininity over the centuries. The bronze and black backgrounds of the pages reinforce the contrast between the museum quality of the works and the crudeness of the story of violence.

Atlante della Misogenia is a corpus of orthophotos of the twenty Italian main cities divided into tables as in a road atlas. In each city, streets, avenues and plazas named after female figures have been highlighted in red. With great immediacy, we evidence how cities are a cultural representation of a society marked by the domination of the male: female toponyms are in fact very few, almost never in a central position and almost always aimed at figures of saints or royalty.

These two visual investigations have been bound with a metal spiral with the main aim of making this book a simple and inexpensive tool for creating exhibitions on the theme of gender equality in the school. Taking two copies of the book and cutting them with a cutter near the ring binding, you will get loose sheets which, following the instructions at the end of the book, can be placed side by side to compose boards to hang on the wall. In the case of the Atlante della Misogenia you will get twenty large maps of Italian cities, while in the case of Bellezze d’Italia you can compose a long continuous strip or cut the individual characters and arrange them in infinite combinations and relationships.

We wanted to use a “plain” typeface, that can work well with art and also with the great amount of maps and small detail in the book. Union by Radim Peško sits somewhere between Helvetica and Arial. Union is a kind of neutral typeface that works very well both in small size and in display size: perfect for this kind of project.