MANUAL OF HOW TO BECOME A GOOD GIRL

From 1 to 30 with zero expectations

“MANUAL OF HOW TO BECOME A GOOD GIRL”

is an editorial project developed this year during the PhMuseum CURAE Masterclass with Erik Kessels.

It is my manual on how to become a good girl, or at least how to survive until thirty in the shoes of a normal girl, in a society governed by mansplaning.

It follows a growth path of my person through the observation of my hand gestures, and the images develop on a very specific timeline, evolving with the passage of time. The photos change, their realization changes, from the family archive to photos taken by friends, to self-portraits, photos from WhatsApp, Facebook and various hard drives collected over the years, leading me to an obsessive search for images.

I have seen tens of thousands of them, and I have chosen the gestures that best represent my private moments.

The choice to start from childhood comes from the consideration that as children we act based on instinct and not experience, and the gestures are therefore more spontaneous and sometimes comical. As we grow, gestures become more conscious, less random, because they have a weight, a direction, because we are conditioned by experiences. That’s why sometimes the sentences that accompany the images are extremely didactic and descriptive, other times they are very ironic or dark. I chose the observation of hands as a symbol of the repetition of events in our daily life.

This project has been featured in Elle Italia print magazine, Perimetro, and shortlisted at Phest Open call 2025 and Perimetro Awards 2025.