Text and Photographs by Elena Bianca Zagari
Un Mondo Proprio (A World of One s Own) grew out of my long-term exploration of women s identities in Naples, the city where I was born. My work explores the contradictions shaping women s lives in Italian society, focusing on how gender norms intersect with personal and collective acts of agency. This project became both an ethnographic and photographic study of how women inhabit, resist, and reimagine their roles in a context denned by deep contradictions – beauty and chaos, devotion and repression, tradition and transformation.
In Naples, Catholic symbolism-above all the image of the Virgin Mary -permeates the city. Shrines appear on corners, balconies, and walls, quietly imposing ideals of purity, sacrifice, and silence. Within this atmosphere, women have long been told how to behave, how to dress, and when to speak. Yet beneath these weighty expectations lies another narrative: one of refusal, reinvention. and agency. I was drawn to capture the fragile yet powerful ways in which women carve out their own spaces of freedom. Bedrooms, bathrooms, and nightclubs become alternate worlds where they reclaim their bodies and identities, away from the noise of the male-dominated street. The rituals of dressing, applying makeup, and adorning themselves with glitter and color are not frivolous gestures – they are acts of resistance, statements of presence. a way of saying: I exist.
For me, fashion in this context is deeply political. It can be both shield and weapon, a means of shaping one s own image in defiance of patriarchal and religious expectations. The women I photographed are not waiting for permission to exist – they are already here, unapologetic and complex, occupying space on their own terms. This book became a tribute to them, to their strength, joy, and vulnerability, which together reflect a collective force: women who insist on being recognised and who transform silence into testimony. “Un Mondo Proprio” is about the tension between being visible and escaping the gaze, about shame turned into witness, and about creating – even in the smallest corners of the city – a world of one s own.
Elena Banca Zagari is a documentary and fashion photographer/director based in London/Milan/Naples.
