One day, within a family, the husband’s habitual violence towards his wife escalates into a femicide. The man kills her by smashing her head in with an iron. The woman lies on the floor, dead, but her death is not enough: no one believes her. And so the woman, like the angel of the hearth in whose grotesque image she finds herself trapped, is forced to get up and return to the same routine: cleaning the house, doing the housework, preparing meals for her son and husband, and looking after her elderly mother-in-law. Every morning, her family find her dead and do not believe her. Every morning she gets up again, opens the moka pot—which is wound too tight—and begins once more to endure her husband’s violence, her son’s depression, and the helplessness of her mother-in-law, who, instead of condemning her brutal and despotic son, pities him. Every evening the wife dies again, as if in a circle of hell where the torment never ends. In the dim light of a sleeping house, the angel shakes the hem of her dressing gown and tries to fly, but she is granted only the intention to fly.

Emma Dante

With her latest work, L’angelo del focolare, Emma Dante (Golden Lion 2026 at the Venice Biennale) returns to explore the female condition with her direct, powerful and visionary style, focusing on women’s subordination, starting with the domestic hearth, where violence is often an everyday occurrence. On stage, a surreal and horrific case of femicide unfolds, in which the victim – killed every evening by her husband – is forced to come back to life, embodying the grotesque image of the ‘angel of the hearth’, to continue reliving the same routine, in the service of her family and the home.