13 years ago the red shoes worn by Judy Garland in the film The Wizard of Oz in 1939 were stolen, the curator of the Judy Garland Museum in Gran Rapids in Minnesota (the hometown of the unforgettable Dorothy, ed) fainted and hoped until the last that it was a joke. Instead it was all true. The sequin-covered red slippers (of which six more are believed to exist in the world), owned by film memorabilia collector Michael Shaw and exceptionally loaned to the Museum, had disappeared. For real.
Red shoes. An immediate, powerful symbol. An effective glance. The red color symbolizes violence, evil, the blood shed by many women all over the world. And at the same time it is the color of love, of passion that turns into evil. Each pair of shoes bears the name of a woman killed by a man.
Red shoes have always been considered the symbol of a woman's delicacy, charm and elegance. Characteristics that every woman has wanted or would like to express freely and without constraints. However, every day those shoes are cruelly torn from the foot of those who would have liked to wear them.
November 25, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Many Italian squares welcome hundreds of red shoes.
The silent march of the red shoes has become a symbol of protest and information around the world.
The empty shoes scream all the agony, the shame, the fears and the condemnation of those who have finally decided to say ENOUGH.
The red shoes thus take on a new symbolic value on this occasion. They stand as the banner of a silent but determined fight against all forms of attack against women.
The Zapatos Rojos were born as a public art project by the Mexican artist Elina Chauvet. Which in 2009 exhibited her installation of 33 red shoes in Ciudad Juárez. This is the city where the femicide rate is so high that it is called "the city that kills women".
The Mexican Elina Chauvet, with this great project has transmitted a strong feeling of reality, of pain but also of strength. He has created a method to denounce and shout to the world the horror that femicide carries out almost daily and the willpower to denounce in order to be reborn.
An expanse of strictly red shoes that identify the number of violence, deaths and mistreatment that women have suffered in their lives.
In 1999, the UN General Assembly chose the date of April 25 in memory of the brutal murder in 1960 of the three Mirabal sisters, considered an example of revolutionary women for the commitment with which they tried to oppose the regime of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930 -1961), the dictator who kept the Dominican Republic in backwardness and chaos for over 30 years. On November 25, 1960, the Mirabal sisters were blocked on the road by agents of the Military Intelligence Service as they were on their way to visit their husbands in prison. Taken to a hidden place nearby, they were tortured, beaten with sticks and strangled, only to be thrown over a precipice in their car to simulate an accident.
Since the beginning of the year, 116 women have already been killed in Italy, most of them dead at the hands of husbands or partners. One death every three days, according to the EURES.
Male violence against women is neither a private fact nor an emergency but a structural and transversal phenomenon of our society, a political fact of the first magnitude that has its roots in the inequality of power between the sexes. Austerity policies and reforms such as those of work and school, in continuity with what has happened in the last ten years, do nothing but undermine the paths of autonomy of women and deepen social, cultural and sexual discrimination.
THE PRODIGY OF IDEAS 