El humor marca la diferencia

I began to work when I was small, making comics, funny stories, jokes. I come from a family with a lot of women. They were the first protagonists and the original audience for my vignettes. The family theatre was a mine of inspiration and lent itself to the telling of conflicts and alliances, scandals and dramas. I desperately needed to transform my anger and, too, my motherʼs anger, I needed to come out alive from the terribly violent fights, real domestic wars, that were unleashed, above all after the premature death of my father, in our furious beehive. The humorous way out almost always worked: in this I was lucky. I did caricatures, little plays, imitations and, above all, jokes. I set out from the fortunate position of being at least two: in general it was my twin sister Cristina and I; my sister appreciated it and would laugh. Humour is nourished by shared pleasure in intense situations. It needs relationship. At its base is the desire to create an alliance founded on pleasure, on bringing about a displacement of perspective in the company of another person. It is the desire to play, also in the midst of bombs. In my story, it is not chance that the first real publication of my jokes took place in 1982, for a book/catalogue of the Milan Womenʼs Bookstore, Le madri di tutte noi (The Mother Of Us All), written in a group. We reflected on our preferred women writers and discovered in them our symbolic mothers. For me it was the discovery of the symbolic mothers of the humour that marks difference, the discovery of my favourite writers: Jane Austen and Ivy Compton-Burnett. In my jokes, the sign is simple and essential; I work more by removing than by adding, and I prefer to leave some strokes open and blank spaces. Sometimes I begin with the text, with the occurrence, and the drawing comes later, but mostly it is a concept which little by little takes form, and turns literally into the bodies of the characters. And the characters are in the main of the female sex.