The White Dress

On 8 March 2008, the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca undertook an unusual and symbolic journey: her aim was to promote the cause of peace by hitchhiking from Milan to Jerusalem, wearing a customised white wedding dress, and documenting the experience by video. In telling the young woman's story, which overwhelms her and inexorably draws her in, Nathalie Leger recounts the different stages of her research and strikes upon something fundamental within Bacca's performance: the desire to remedy the unfathomable nature of violence and war. Through this intense examination of Bacca's final work and of the often polarised public reaction to the role of women in art, Leger also compellingly addresses her own conflicted relationship with her elderly mother.