The face of a little girl, a bikini. A three-day beard and checkered boxers. For his entire life, Angela Grippi struggled with his womanhood. It was a deep-seated malaise that eventually led him to become a man, Simone. Alessia Bernardini’s artist’s book, Becoming Simone, an intimate, visual journal that documents this metamorphosis, is marvelous. The genuine and deeply moving story of a sexual revolution, bound together by a thin yellow thread, fans out like an accordion, combining childhood photographs, family memories, fragments of adulthood and, finally, transformation. “I did, I wanted to do, and I will do,” reads the preface.
The quality of the images—time-worn, black and white, color, digital—and who took them is unimportant, although some of them are beautiful. What this notebook contains is the singular story of a life filled with existential questions and the desire to become something else, to free oneself from a feminine “handicap” in order to one day embrace a woman as a man. From the facial expressions to the posture, Angela became Simone, a boyish 51-year old who has put the uncertainties of adolescence behind him.
“The male name I chose for myself is Simone, because it’s a name that my mother used to love,” he says. “When I liked a woman, I used to blush, I could not look into her eyes. When I was little, at night, I used to pray God to wake me up as a man. I used to have a female body, but inside I was a man: I talked, felt, walked and acted as a man. Inside I never was a female. I have always been Simone.”
Angela is there, a child, surrounded by her family. She’s wearing a ballet dress and slippers, posing for a school photo, carrying big white cat. On the facing page, Simone, curly hair and vest, cigarette in hand, catches some sun. It’s a fascinating visual contrast for an extraordinary story and delicate book, pleasing to the touch, like a pearl.
BOOK
Becoming Simone
By Alessia Bernardini
64 photos + envelope
Format 210 x 210 cm
30 euros
