Un Mondo Proprio (A World Of One's Own)

Un Mondo Proprio is a photographic series exploring young women in Naples and the ways they negotiate identity, visibility, and autonomy within a city marked by cultural, religious, and social tensions. The work investigates how gender norms, tradition, and contemporary urban life intersect, and how women claim and shape spaces both public and private. The series captures intimate and nocturnal moments — in bedrooms, bathrooms, and nightlife environments — revealing the gestures, rituals, and forms of self-expression through which these women inhabit the city on their own terms. Fashion, makeup, and aesthetic choices are depicted not as decoration but as tools of negotiation, empowerment, and reclamation of space. Through these acts, the subjects create “worlds of their own,” asserting identity from within rather than performing it for the outside gaze. Un Mondo Proprio engages with broader questions about femininity, autonomy, and collective presence in contemporary Italy. The portraits document both vulnerability and strength, illustrating how young women reclaim their bodies, their visibility, and their narratives. The work presents a vision of self-determined femininity, where presence, desire, and agency converge to create spaces and lives that are authentically their own.