Hanna Lucatelli and MADRE: In Porto Alegre, the Mural That Rewrites the Story of Italian Emigration
On the wall of the future headquarters of the Italian Consulate General in Rio Grande do Sul, the Brazilian artist creates a monumental work that recenters a figure long left at the margins of the story of emigration: the woman.
Link to the Italian version on Artribune
This Interview connects to my hub, Feminism in Art Isn’t a Style: It’s a Battle Over Visibility, and to the Feminism category.
In Porto Alegre, on the façade of the future headquarters of the Italian Consulate General in Rio Grande do Sul, Hanna Lucatelli (São Paulo, 1990) has created MADRE, inaugurated on March 24, a mural 45 meters high and 9 meters wide that engages a subject steeped in memory without turning it into a predictable celebration. I met her together with curator Giulia Lavinia Lupo, who accompanied the project, and from our very first exchanges it was clear that the work arose from a precise need: to dislodge the story of Italian emigration from its most familiar axis. At the center is not the man associated with labor, founding, and patriarchal lineage, but the woman. The mother who crosses the ocean, who preserves and transmits language, memory, habits, faith, strength.
Hanna Lucatelli’s vision of women
For years, Lucatelli has explored the female presence in urban space. In her murals, women are neither decorative figures nor passive allegories, but presences capable of altering the energy of a place. In MADRE, that line of inquiry meets a collective memory that remains extraordinarily powerful in southern Brazil, where Italian heritage continues to be a living part of cultural identity.
Interview with Hanna Lucatelli
In your work, the female figure returns as a strong presence, yet never a stereotyped one. Where does this urgency come from?
It comes from a very precise perception. I was a young mother, raised by strong women, and in public space I kept seeing reductive images of women, often sexualized, constructed for a male gaze. When I began painting in the street, I felt that space allowed me to propose another image of women. Not a perfect model, but a real presence, with dignity, strength, and complexity. From that point on, my work also became political, because changing images means changing the symbolic environment in which we live. MADRE continues that line of inquiry. I wanted a real woman, not softened, capable of standing on the wall with force.
The street remains the decisive space in your practice. What does the wall offer you that the canvas cannot?
I come from the street. Canvas came later, especially during the pandemic, but the wall remains the place where painting, for me, truly becomes political. In urban space, the image encounters people who are not out looking for art. It has to speak even to those rushing past, to those without theoretical tools, to those who might never enter a museum. That is why my language remains figurative, legible. What interests me is that beauty should draw people in, but that something deeper should remain within the image. Every mural is born in dialogue with the place. I do not impose an image from the outside. I try to listen to the space, its history, what it is asking for.
How did you arrive at the figure of this mother?
The process was intuitive, but not improvised. I received stories, materials, and testimonies about the Italian community, and one thing struck me immediately: almost everything revolved around men. Grandfathers, fathers, work, construction, descent. I, instead, kept thinking about women. In my experience, it is they who, in daily life, truly transmit culture: language, habits, the relationship to family, to religion, to memory. So I began asking myself who that woman was who crossed the ocean one hundred and fifty years ago, what she felt, how much courage it must have taken. From that question, the figure in the mural emerged. I did not want the portrait of a specific person, but a presence capable of gathering a collective feeling.
How much of your personal experience as a mother enters into MADRE?
Very deeply. Being a mother and an artist is very difficult. Motherhood fragments time, whereas art requires duration, concentration, continuity. At times, it seems almost impossible to make the two coexist. Yet motherhood has also made me more vulnerable, more open, more connected to emotion. That is in MADRE too. The boat is full, the children are there, and yet that woman is alone in the task of holding everything together. That tension mattered greatly to me: the mother as a figure of love, but also of responsibility, strain, exposure. And I believe that the figure of the mother is now almost out of fashion in contemporary art. That too is why I felt the need to bring her back to the center.
Giulia, how did the project begin, and why was it important to avoid the clichés surrounding Italian emigration?
Giulia Lavinia Lupo: The project began about a year ago with the Italian Consulate General in Porto Alegre. From the outset, I was certain that I did not want a celebratory operation in any conventional sense. Italian emigration in Brazil is a deeply powerful subject, but it is also full of ready-made images, clichés, and reassuring narratives. Here there was a chance to address it in a less predictable and more profound way. The first thing I asked was that the community be involved and that its stories be heard, rather than simply treating the wall as a surface. And for me, from the beginning, the artist was Hanna. I knew she could bring a work that was strong, free, and not illustrative. Before the official history of emigration, there was a woman who decided to leave. For me, everything begins there.
In this work, did you also want to challenge an established image?
Yes. I was not interested in adding yet another reassuring image to the memory of Italian emigration. I wanted to shift the point of view. If a woman is placed at the center, everything changes: the tone of the story changes, the kind of courage one sees changes, and even the way we think about inheritance changes. The woman who leaves is not merely accompanying someone. She carries a world with her.
What do you hope the public will feel when standing before MADRE?
I would like them to stop, even if only for a moment. I would like them to feel that they are not simply looking at a tribute to Italian emigration, but at a human presence. A woman bearing a story too vast to be told in any simple way. And I would like them to recognize in her not only the past, but something that still belongs to the present: the courage to cross, the burden of holding things together, the dignity of those who remain invisible and yet sustain everything.
Hanna Lucatelli’s practice
The force of MADRE lies here: in its ability to move back through a collective memory from a point of view that remained sidelined for far too long. Hanna Lucatelli does not seek folklore, but a deeper emotional truth. And the phrase painted on the wall, “Mother of memory across the ocean to sow the future,” ultimately restores to the history of emigration not only a story, but the human face from which it all began.
