Èxegì monumèntum àere perènnius
règalìque sitù pýramidum àltius,
quòd non ìmber edàx, nòn Aquilo ìmpotens
pòssit dìruere àut ìnnumeràbilis
ànnorùm seriès èt fuga tèmporum.

Horace, “Odes” (III, 30)

Monument, from the Latin monumentum, which in turn derives from the verb monēre, to remember. Improbable, again from the Latin improbabilis, which has little chance of happening. And so far everything is clear, we are in etymological objectivity. Then we get into the merits of Sonia Lenzi's project dedicated to monuments, which, as she defines them, have little chance of being built.  At this point the perspective changes, we are in the field of subjectivity and as such we can accept or reject it. But first, let's try to understand. Sonia Lenzi reflects on the fact that photography is a subjective representation that subjectively preserves what the author wants to preserve and which others will then, equally subjectively, have to interpret.

However, photography is her creation instrument and must still measure itself against a hypothesis of concreteness. What is more concrete and tangible than a monument dedicated to celebration and remembrance? And the second inevitable question is: who should we celebrate and remember? Here the answer is easy, she suggests it herself: partisans, photographers, artists, writers, politicians, civil rights activists, singers, educators, women who have lived, done, achieved, loved, fought, won and lost and who history remembered or forgotten. Sonia Lenzi then draws up a list of names of women who do not have a monument or who have an unsatisfactory monument. It identifies around forty, but the list is open and can and must be further enriched.

Then she thinks of her city, Bologna, and would like her most lasting bronze monuments to be erected here, as Horace wanted in 23 BC. She investigates. She studies. She hypothesizes the size of the monument and construction materials. She finds suitable locations, which do not necessarily offer the space to place a monument but certainly offer the space to dream of the presence of a monument. How would the women that Sonia Lenzi listed want to be represented, remembered, monumentalized? And this new question can only have subjective answers, entrusted to the process of reflection that the cards she has prepared must induce. She began photographing places with the declared desire to suggest only urban environments that could trigger the mechanism of curiosity, of comparison between the woman's name and the space that should host the monument. We are dealing with an open offer: its entries begin with a tribute to a photographer, Dorothea Lange, and end (provisionally) with another photographer-botanist, Anna Atkins. But the forty cards or a few more that she has created up to now begin with the number 12 and end with the number 138. There are many cards still to be created, many cities, too, where her unlikely monuments could and should find a place.

With gentle irony Sonia Lenzi proposes to place the monument to Maria Callas (in bronze, of course, 3 meters and 80 cm high) in Piazza Verdi, that to Aleksandra Kollontai in Piazza dell'Unità, that to Alda Merini in Piazza Carducci (will they get along?), the one to Alfonsina Strada on the Circonvallazione avenues and that of Anna Atkins, author of the first photographic book in history, illustrated with cyanotypes of algae, at the Botanical Garden. Her choice of women's names, places, and combinations are obviously subjective. We can accept or reject them, as free will dictates, but we cannot ignore what Sonia Lenzi has put before our eyes: absence. Which the photography underlines and which the author does not want to fill but only highlights. Because it is now evident and obligatory to realize that women have made history even if the history of men has not always realized this.

Giovanna Calvenzi