How would you introduce or describe the work you will present at PitchWise 2017?
La Metralli is an eclectic Italian band founded between Modena and Bologna (Italy) in 2009.
The band has released two albums “Del mondo che vi lascio” (2011) and “Qualche grammo di gravità” (also recorded in English “Few Grams Of Gravity“, 2013). The videoclip of the track “The Travellers’ Hymn” was officially selected at the 2014 Independent New York Film Festival and the whole album ”Qualche grammo di gravità” has been selected among the best 50 albums of the year 2014 by one of the most renowned Italian music associations “Premio Luigi Tenco”.
The band won the “Premio Ciampi” in 2012 (Ciampi Prize honors the best original lyrics and musical composition) with the ballad “Piovevo“.
We have also been on air with the American TV series “Missing” on the ABC, and on SKY Italy, with the song “Prima che il vento”. We have composed and played the soundtrack for the iPad app for kids “Play Art”, which has won the “The Lovie Awards” in London. We have also been in contact with Ryat (Ninja Tune label) for a collaboration proposal in her european tour.
We have been selected as guest band and went to play at Palafiori in Casa Sanremo on February 18th 2014, during the last edition of the Festival of Sanremo (the major national festival of Italian music).
Our albums have been very positively reviewed so far. By the way of an example, it got 8 on Mucchio and gor a two-pages interview articole on Rockerilla. They both are very prestigious music magazines in Italy.
The band is going to release the third album in 2017, Lanimante.
The band can either perform in Italian or in English.
What do you know about the women’s movement, and the development of intersectional feminism in Bosnia and Herzegovina?
I know very little unfortunately, but I know very well the situation of women in Italy and Europe and above all I know very deeply the issue of violence against women because I work in a violent center in my city.
What similarities can you see in Italy and Bosnia and Herzegovina relating to patriarchal culture and the challenges faced by members of marginalized communities? And what do you think our respective communities can learn from each other through participation in PitchWise 2017?
I suppose the similitudes are many, perhaps in italy the patriarchal society is more focused on the cultural control of the masses, the community, perhaps more focused on planning how to promote cultural and political products where women are conceived as objects of beauty, possession, of exploitation.
Only another more sophisticated but equally brutal expression of the patriarchy.
Are themes of gender present in your work, and if so, how?
I write mostly about the theme and the content of our songs in this project but We have no specific gender issues. The fact that I am a songwriter-woman is, I think, something uncomfortable for Italian music business.
there are very few songwriters – woman in Italy (i’m not one of these one) who emerge for what they do and not for how they appear and they make them appear.
The Italian music business is strongly sexist and masked.
In the face of the resurgence of right-wing agendas across the world in recent years, have you felt any sort of difference in your work (or life)? How has this affected you or your colleagues?
Working at the women’s home I see that the advancement of the right has led to a change in the management of migratory flows and the management of the phenomenon of violence. In Italy there is a serious trend to the medicalisation of gender violence, because it is interpreted forcibly and for patriarchal reasons the cultural problem of violence as a problem of public order and public health.
The most important thing at this time is to take care of art to culture, to re-open new possibilities of reading and thinking, the struggle through words, books, music, designs, newborn arts are powerful growth tools for a community.
Marina Abramovich Is an example of a great artist who through his acts and performances shakes the consciences !
How do you intersect art and activism?
Art for me is political. Beauty is political. When beauty coincides with the values of struggle, freedom, disobedience to a given system is also activism.
