In the context of a broader work that focuses on defining my own identity, the desire to find a connection with my mother, to whom I am not close, has pushed me towards self portraiture and family archive research. Starting from the belief that trauma is passed down within a family, generation after generation, I’ve come to look at the history of four generations of women in my family as a story of women that, over the past century, were trapped by the role society wanted them to fulfil. At the same time, they were each escaping their personal familial roles of motherhood; their own mothers. The four generations of women and mothers portrayed in this project span more than a century: from my grandmother born in 1904 to myself. In spite of the evolution and change in the condition of women in Western society and in Italy from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day (the right to vote in Italy was only given to women in 1946), gender roles remain rather defined, maintained by a society that leaves the responsibility of parenthood and child care almost exclusively to women. A society that still lives deeply immersed in the taboo of the “bad mother” and sees the true fulfilment of women only in the experience of being a mother. In this way, the project, which began as a personal research project, embraces a much broader theme; that of the role of women in society from the early post-war period to the beginning of the 21st century, and how inter-generational relationships are influenced by a patriarchal system. This project has also taken the form of a book where, together with self portraits and archive photos, in constant dialogue with each other, appear fragments of written material, both as images or transcribed. This material is very diverse and ranges from personal diaries and notes to official documents collected during hearings for my custody in the late 80s.