Once Upon a Moment in Time

Reflections on my Bogliasco Fellowship Residency and the HerStory Project

It is hard to gather words to express what emotions want to convey. It is even harder to find words capable of describing the beauty of a place. Perhaps only a painter’s brush can achieve this, transforming beauty into a direct expression. Words, no matter how beautifully woven together, can never quite translate what the eyes behold.

That is how I would describe Villa dei Pini in Bogliasco, the extraordinary place I had the privilege of calling home for an entire month.

It was one of those rare experiences when you do not want the days to pass. You become conscious of every minute, every hour, and with each passing day, something inside you grows heavier at the thought of leaving the beauty that lies so graciously before your eyes.

Some places have an identity, a presence, and, even more, a spirit of their own. Villa dei Pini is one of them. Welcoming, generous, and expansive, much like the sea stretching beneath its cliffs, in a continuous movement of regeneration, of becoming.

There, nature and human imagination seem to breathe together. The elegance of the villa, the gardens, the pine trees, the sea, the movement of light, the gentle breeze, and the birds create a continuous expression of beauty. It is a place where beauty is not simply something one observes. It becomes part of the experience of being there.

To be able to stay in such a place, to write and simply breathe, at a time when every breath seems congested with the dust of war, suffocation, and oppression, is a blessing. Nothing more adequately expresses what it feels like. A blessing in times of inflicted curses.

A breath of fresh air when the dust of bulldozers and rubble has become part of the very air one breathes.

I came to Bogliasco with a project I believed was approaching completion. For the past several years, I had been working on HerStory, a historical guidebook tracing the presence of women across time, places, cultures, and civilizations, particularly those whose existence and contributions had been obscured, marginalized, or erased from historical memory.

I arrived with a plan, a mission that seemed clearly defined: to complete the manuscript.

But HerStory had become something more complicated in my life than a research and writing project.

Living under conditions of prolonged oppression, suppression, and the constant threat of removal from place, space, and existence, writing had become both a necessity and a difficulty. For someone who breathes through writing, deciding not to express oneself publicly, or to write only for oneself, can feel like a form of annihilation.

Yet I continued writing.

HerStory became a way of surviving a reality in which words could be misinterpreted, distorted, or used against you. There was something almost cynical in the thought that writing about women of the distant past could provide a refuge from the severity of the present.

While I was hiding behind women, I was unearthing them, attempting to reclaim their place in time and history.

But there was another dimension to this concealment, one I had not fully confronted.

On one side, I needed to write, to research, to produce. On the other, I was no longer certain that anything meant anything, or that anything still had a real purpose.

I continued working, reading, gathering historical evidence, identifying women, tracing their names and lives through the fragments left behind in historical records. I was producing, but increasingly through a technical and almost tactical process. The work continued even as my confidence in the meaning of the work itself was being eroded.

It was not that I had lost the ability to write. I had begun losing the conviction that writing, or perhaps anything, could still make a difference.

And there is something profoundly unsettling about continuing to produce words when the world around you seems to be stripping words, actions, and even human existence of their meaning.

At Bogliasco, something began to change.

It was not an immediate revelation, nor did the beauty surrounding me make the realities I had brought with me disappear. It was the gradual experience of breathing without the constant weight of those realities pressing upon every thought.

Walking through the gardens of Villa dei Pini, looking towards the sea, listening to the birds and the movement of the trees, I felt as though the dusty sediments accumulated in my mind were slowly being swept away.

The images of rubble, the dust of destruction, the sounds of buzzing drones coming through the screens from Gaza had occupied more than my attention. They had settled somewhere inside my thinking, shaping the very conditions in which thoughts could emerge.

In Bogliasco, the sea breeze, the pine trees, the serenity, and the continuous movement of nature began to soften something that had grown rigid within me.

For the first time in a long while, my mind seemed able to breathe naturally, without having to struggle for every thought.

I found myself returning to the pleasure of reading, of dwelling on an idea without immediately demanding a result from it, of following a question simply because it deserved to be explored. I also rediscovered the physical intimacy of writing: the connection between my hand, a pen, and a sheet of paper, the simple pleasure of allowing thoughts to find their way into words.

And as I returned to HerStory, I began reconsidering the very project I had come to complete.

For years, I had been unearthing women from history, almost like an archaeologist recovering bodies long buried beneath the monuments of Egyptian pharaohs, Chinese monarchs, Babylonian sovereigns, and Roman emperors. I had been gathering names, examining evidence, establishing their existence, and finding satisfaction in recovering what had disappeared from collective memory.

I believed that revealing their names, their presence, and their existence was already an accomplishment.

But one morning, wandering through the garden, thinking about the women I was about to situate in my guidebook, something shifted.

I suddenly felt that these women deserved more than a tombstone bearing a name, a description, a paragraph, or a section in another book attempting to prove that women had once been there.

It was as though all those unearthed bodies began to rise.

Each woman seemed to take me back into her own time, her own space, her own existence. Not simply to demonstrate that she had lived, but to make me encounter the world in which she had been present.

It was as though they were refusing to remain historical evidence of their own existence.

They had lived. They had inhabited worlds, occupied spaces, made choices, exercised influence, endured circumstances, and participated in histories that were never exclusively the histories of men.

And yet, somewhere between their lives and the histories that survived them, their presence had been diminished, displaced, or erased.

I could not entirely grasp what I was searching for, or what these women seemed to be leading me towards. But I knew that something essential was missing from the way I had approached the project.

I began reconsidering the books I had read, the historical accounts I had gathered, and the structure I had developed. I realized that I needed to reread, restructure, redesign, and perhaps rewrite substantial parts of HerStory.

I had come to Bogliasco intending to finish a guidebook that brought women into history.

I began to understand that what I was trying to accomplish was something else.

It was not simply about bringing women into historical narratives. It was about reclaiming their presence.

Their presence in time, in space, in the events and circumstances of their lives, and in the worlds they inhabited.

The distinction may seem subtle, but it changes the questions one asks of history. It is no longer sufficient to establish that a woman existed, or even to document what she accomplished. One must also examine the historical world in which she lived, the ways her presence was recorded or obscured, and the processes through which that presence disappeared from the histories inherited by subsequent generations.

It also means questioning the historical narratives themselves: not only what they tell us, but what they have taught us not to see.

I began to think that the erasure of women from historical memory might also reveal something about the erasure of peoples, cultures, and civilizations. That perhaps, by tracing women’s presence and disappearance, we might begin to read history differently, discovering connections, experiences, and realities that conventional historical narratives have left outside their boundaries.

Somehow, when one begins digging into the histories of women, history itself begins to speak differently. Events acquire other dimensions. Familiar narratives become less familiar. What once appeared marginal may suddenly become essential to understanding the whole.

These are questions I am still exploring. Bogliasco did not provide all the answers. It gave me the possibility of asking them again, and of approaching my work with a renewed capacity to think beyond the immediate necessity of producing.

The residency therefore became something quite different from what I had anticipated. Rather than simply completing a manuscript, I began reconsidering its intellectual foundations, its structure, and the kind of historical encounter I wanted to make possible for the reader.

I had arrived with a clearly defined mission: to finish HerStory while experiencing the simple normality of breathing.

I left with a different understanding of what HerStory needed to become.

And perhaps most importantly, I left having regained something I had not fully realized I was losing: my capacity to think, to read, to write, and to dwell on my thoughts.

The beauty of Bogliasco did not erase the reality waiting beyond its gardens. Nor did it resolve the questions about meaning and purpose that I had carried with me.

But it gave me the space to confront them, to allow thoughts to develop without the constant urgency of survival, and to rediscover writing not merely as an act of production, but as an engagement with questions that remain worth asking, even when answers seem impossible.

Beyond the beauty and serenity of Bogliasco, there was the privilege of sharing this experience with an extraordinary group of fellows from different disciplines, backgrounds, and parts of the world. Their ideas, conversations, and perspectives enriched my time there in ways I had not anticipated. Being selected as the inaugural recipient of the Paramora Fellowship, sponsored by Marcia-Z-Tapestry, was an especially humbling honor, one that made this experience even more meaningful.

I came to Bogliasco believing that HerStory was nearly finished.

I left knowing that I had only begun to understand what I was trying to write.

And that was the greatest feeling of all.