Chi fermerà queste croci? The song "Who Will Stop These Crosses?" is conceived as a biblical psalm on the eternal femicide.
It is a long, painful list of female deaths and violence that have occurred only in the last two years in Italy, but it feels as if it embraces an infinite span of time and space.
It pertains to a crime that has systematically taken place for centuries, almost never appearing in its phenomenon of endless massacre or as a disturbing social pathology.
We know about the massacre of the innocents from the Gospel accounts and the pictorial iconography of which it has been one of the most widespread themes, but the slaughter of women over the centuries has seldom been discussed in a broader context, excluding the cruel times of the Holy Inquisition and the Witch Hunts; there has almost never been a true awareness, a concern from social hierarchies, or popular outrage regarding this matter.
Let us consider that the term uxoricidio, etymologically means the killing of the wife (from the Latin uxor-wife), but there is no equivalent crime name for the killing of the husband by his wife, to the point that the word “uxoricidio” has been extended, as a legal term, to mean the killing of the spouse, but we know well that the etymology is different, clearly demonstrating what the most common crime has always been.
Reading that macabre list of murdered women, I had the sense that, despite the variety of the ferocity experienced, of different ages: from early adolescence to old age, the diversity of their countries of origin, social status, beyond all this, there was a representation that united these victims in a common, grand fresco.
Thus, little by little, I saw unfold, in the spiral form of infinity, a procession in which, in the endless column, the victims, like in a Byzantine mosaic, bore the same appearances and wore the same clothing, as if death had united them in a martyrdom of testimony and struggle against a culture that refuses to accept their freedom of choice and thus their happiness, seen as the utmost provocation and threat to the ruthless and lost murderer.
I wrote it both in the sense of who will stop this slaughter, and in the meaning that no one will ever be able to halt this distant, patient, tireless chiseling of women against the ancient wall of their holocaust, covered by a dust of names, of hair, of lips, of hairpins, of drops of blood and tears.
(Massimo Bubola)
