Project Category: in production

Status: in production, seeking funding

200 years have passed since Cherubino Patà’s birth, yet his biography is full of unanswered questions. The painter, born in Sonogno – a tiny village at the end of the Verzasca Valley in southern Switzerland -, has travelled through Switzerland, France and Algeria, yet remains quite unknown to the wider public. The artist is mainly defined by his role of assistance to Gustave Courbet, to whom he was a close friend.

Patà was one of Courbet’s most loyal friends. In the artist’s final years, he was constantly by his side. It was he who, tirelessly looking out for the Realist’s interests, succeeded – after the Paris Commune – in getting him to take up his paintbrush again.

Emile Gros-Kost, Courbet: souvenirs intimes, 1880

As cultural institutions are trying to locate works by Patà in an effort to establish a comprehensive catalogue of his production, our curiosity is turned to the man holding the brush. Who was Cherubino Patà? How did he leave the tiny Verzasca village to reach the Salon de Paris, and the shores of Alger? What prompted his many travels?

In this personal research, director Céline Stegmüller sets out to pay tribute to her great-grandmother’s uncle, retracing his footsteps through his paintings.

Status: in production, seeking funding

This is the story of three women who believe that coming into the world should be as little traumatic as possible for everyone involved. Laura, Angela, and Delta dedicate their lives to turning this belief into action, enabling mothers-to-be to reclaim childbirth as a natural physiological phenomenon.

Each of these three women represents a different facet of the push for positive birth in Italian-speaking Switzerland, which strives to keep up with the times: the medical professionalism of midwife Laura, the digital activism of young mother Angela, and the political-institutional commitment of pioneer Delta.

Following Laura, Angela, and Delta in their battles allows us to take a closer look at the tension between the prevailing model of medicalised hospital birth and the desire – and need – for a more personalised, woman-centred approach, in the context of Ticino, which lags behind the rest of the country on this issue. A project aimed at improving the experience of mothers giving birth at the Ente Ospedaliero Cantonale (EOC) has been under discussion for nearly ten years – 2025 could be the year it is finally realised.