The Body I Live In is the third exhibition cycle organized by Rifugio Digitale, to explore contemporary photography as a means of reflecting on the complexity of the human body. This exhibition, which undertakes a visual voyage intended to shed light on representations of the female body in history, is more than a reflection, as it also focuses on the inequities and injustices that have become so deeply radicalized in the collective imagination as to leave scars that, still today, affect the ways in which we perceive and treat the female body.

This is a story of women who fly, old women who cast spells, young girls who rescue enchanted frogs. But it is not a fairy tale; it is a very dark page of true history, of the Basque countries and others, one of the many pages in which women’s bodies were battered, assaulted and abused, becoming the objects of a persecution born of ignorance and superstition, scapegoats for a wave of collective hysteria which, in Europe along, between the Middle Ages and modern times, caused over fifty thousand victims.

All of Them Witches, by Bego Anton, is a visual reconstruction of the history of witch-hunts in the Basque countries, arising from the artist’s creative impulse, as well as from a political need to demystify the idea of the witch. She does this using powerful, evocative images, brimming with mystery, absolutely contemporary but surprisingly timeless. Her photographs remind us that the idea of the witch is a myth with profound roots in misogyny, and that, in a period of history when the structure of patriarchal society begins to be questioned, it is fundamental, as the photographer tells us, “to share this part of our history, to reflect on our past, and elevate the feminine gender”