Una volta, all’improvviso…is a workshop created in collaboration with the Casa Circondariale di Rebibbia (Rebibbia detention centre), Rome, with Claudia Losi and VIC, Volunteers in Prison. It was born on the occasion of the 2016 exhibition Please Come Back, as the second stage of a project started in 2012 and donated to the MAXXI collection. The artist chose to leave the museum to work with a group of female inmates of the Rebibbia prison institution: more than activating the children’s imagination, she wanted to reflect with them on the forced long-distance relationship between parent and child, where affectivity can take complex, sometimes very painful forms.

Words, writing, drawing: this preceded the work in the internal tailoring of the prison, involving some of the women willing to participate. The result was a story, only apparently mild, about motherhood and the close family relationship experienced by an inmate. Each woman-mother personally created or assisted in making her own gift, a vehicle for rebuilding a difficult bond, with a child, grandchild or, in some cases, a loved one. Seven appointments were scheduled fortnightly. From the workshop experience of those months a video/audio animation was born (with drawings by Francesca Dainotto and direction by Daniele Signaroldi): audio fragments recorded inside and outside Rebibbia are intertwined with readings of texts specially written by the artist.