THE 5 CARMELAS

The “5 Carmelas” Project was born following a twenty-year journey of research on the theme of the multiplicity of being, research carried out by Carmela Santoro during her travels around the world and by other minds who over the years have inspired by the theme of the fragmentation of personal identity and which in turn inspired and carried forward this enormous and varied study.
A topic studied and experienced firsthand, Carmela takes us by the hand through a journey that crosses multiple countries and cities such as Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia, Brazil, Berlin, Barcelona, London, Naples, to then arrive in Turin, where he has established his temporary base for the last nine years.
During her travels Carmela had the opportunity to come into contact with different realities and different cultures, each of which gave her a peculiar perception on the theme of the human being as an existence with the double nature of one and multiple.
The theme is in fact so linked to the nature of the human being himself that it manages to transcend the differences in culture and language and can be found under different names and representations within completely different civilizations. Thus starting from a recapitulation of her life, Carmela managed to reconstruct and redefine what she herself perceived as her five main identities and to give them a concrete form through the art of sewing.
In her clothes Donna Carmela has in fact created paths of reconstruction, highlighted by the visible stitching in contrasting colours, with which she alludes to the union of events and encounters, affections, absences and desires that constitute and reconstitute the fragmented parts of us themselves.
If the theme of identity splitting is generally associated with traumatic events such as death and violence, which have the characteristic of being carriers of various problems such as isolation, alienation, confusion and loss of clarity, the path that Donna Carmela worked primarily on herself and that she invites each of us to follow is a path of restoring and rebuilding the self.
Path implemented primarily through the recognition and appreciation of each of the versions of personal identity, only in the light of an initial recognition can one then proceed to use each of these identities as personal strengths and talents, to succeed finally to reinsert them into a vision of identity in which the multiplicity of the self is no longer perceived as fragmentary and dislocated, but as a positive collectivity.

The project is expressed artistically in 5 forms, in co-creation with artists and specialists in the sector such as psychotherapists and innovative researchers:

• Sewing courses
• Seminars and workshops to learn the path of
• Personality Recognition and Management
• Performance/Show
• Documentaries
• Movies

and will be poured into the social sector, creating a network with other associations, collectives etc.