Roman mural outlining the chain of violence against women will be restored for International Women’s Day – The Art Newspaper

A sprawling contemporary street mural, a living memorial to women murdered in Italy since 2012, will be restored tomorrow, International Women’s Day (8 March), by community members in Rome’s San Lorenzo district. Murale contro il Femminicidio (Mural Against Femicide, 2012-13), by the Italian artistsMarina Biagini and Elisa Caracciolo, marks the deaths of hundreds of women at the hands of men, through domestic or other violence.

The mural is atypical of Rome’s graffiti writing where, on residential buildings and commercial edifices, tags are frantically “thrown up” over imagery on painted scenes. Instead, at the site of this work created with house paint, graffiti halts abruptly at the mural’s beginning, and recommences in intense commotion at its end. It is a remarkable fracture, a screeching optical pause in the mores of street art, a sign of seriousness and community reckoning.

Mural Against Femicide is realised on two perpendicular walls where Via dei Sardi and Via degli Enotri meet, surrounding playing fields and a 1926 building. The artist-activist pair, known collectively as WaW Duo, selected the site specifically for this project. They were moved to create the mural here by a mix ofoutrage at patriarchal violence in Italy, the teeming street corner’s proximity to student and faculty communities of Sapienza University, and the area’s long-term acceptance of public murals and left-leaning political history.

“We were looking for a way to represent the incredible number of women who were killed,” Biagini says, “the number of lives that are broken. When you are in front of the wall, you can see how [big] the problem is.” The mural commemorates the murders of 128 women in 2012 and 130 in 2013. According to the Italian Ministry of the Interior’s report on gender violence, between January and December 2024, 101 women were killed, more than half by their partner or ex-partner. (It is unclear if the data includes information on gay or trans women.)

Caracciolo adds that the scale of the attacks contributed to siting: “We looked for a wall that was big and long enough. And we wanted to choose a place already open to this kind of artistic expression. San Lorenzo had both.”

San Lorenzo’s history does not derive from larger-than-life Roman emperors. The strength of the community is rooted in its history as a workers’ settlement, with visible evidence of ruin from a 1943 Allied bombing campaign and of resistance fighters within, with the added vibrancy from the university and plentiful outdoor art with probing political themes. The neighbourhood has welcomed bold foment on its streets, from artists and graffiti writers, and is more well-known for student hangouts and nightlife than for tourism.

In Biagini and Caracciolo’s mural, the white silhouettes of more than two hundred women are painted on a terracotta-hued background. Their outlines are a recurring template whose linear simplicity evokes a simple paper doll chain, interconnected through handholding. When viewers face the figures in the mural, they may think of the fragile folds and repetition of cutout playthings, but the relationships are instead through a chain of violence where figures beckon passersby at human scale. Their individuality is assured: each woman, ranging in age from their teens to their seventies, bears a first name and the date of her murder written in a small dark rectangle placed on her upper chest.

Since the mural was completed, family members have written to Biagini and Caracciolo requesting photos of the image of loved ones. The names were initially culled from sources gathered by Bologna’s Women’s House to Not Suffer Violence. Today, information on women’s deaths in Italy is accessible across governmental portals and other websites.

The decision to include first names to mark the brutal loss of specific lives adds humanity to the project, even as a shared inhumanity unifies the imagery. This practice parallels the “Say Their Names” campaign of the global Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, where the deceased individual is heralded rather than generalised. After Trayvon Martin was murdered in Florida in 2012, awareness of the crime came from the ongoing recitation of his name. Since then, names of victims are chanted privately and publicly, in homes, on streets, in parks, on campuses and at civic centres.

Though graffiti writers have largely respected the boundaries of Mural Against Femicide, the work has nonetheless been vandalised, with some names gouged out—an assault on identity. Biagini, Caracciolo, residents and other groups have restored the names and today and tomorrow they will clean the walls before joining the thousands expected to march in Rome on International Women’s Day. Because the walls will accommodate no more figures and as the artists survey new potential sites, the project continues on social media, updated with information of recent victims. In this way, the mural has entered the digital commons, a shared space where its reach is unlimited.