They are producing literally from scratch a discourse that puts them in relation to the world, for the first time ever, not only in relation to man. And these women who are one woman, as this one woman who is all these women, are giving birth to a discourse. This exhibition made me realize that this was the first time that this process could ever be recorded. Yes, they are meeting, and what do they do? They listen to each other in the name of freedom of expression, they do not just protest, but they employ consciousness to transform it into autonomy. Meanwhile, in the same period, the feminists are meeting in the city, opening their spaces and taking the streets. She creates, does, mails “correspondence:” always putting the “I” in relation to others. In Italian, mailing is called corrispondenza, which literally means correspondence. Meanwhile, this woman that is one and many is alphabetizing, creating a new taxonomy, using her body, protesting from home to get out in the world. T his we stands against the endless “I” of the male genius, and of conceptual art, where the idea becomes commodity and power. These women were saying things I said myself, they were making gestures I have done, their language was echoing mine to the point I thought -this means I am not alone, this means I am one of many, this means that this “I” is a “we.” And in this historical moment this we is important, is contemporary and relevant especially in the art world. Courtesy The Ketty La Rocca Estate and Frittelli Arte Contemporanea, Firenze. Ketty La Rocca, Le mie parole e tu?, 1971. This is what all these women were telling me, as if it was one single woman speaking, as if it was me. And we can’t waste time, because we need to claim the fact that our destiny should be in our hands. Our words can be as nervous to counterpart all the imposed silences there have been, and still are enough for a genealogy. It made me think about Agnes Varda saying “I tried to be a happy feminist, but I was really angry” and our right to be, indeed angry, to use the word “hope” and to reject imposed models of perfection. Both things made me think of this anecdote, in terms of linguistic and symbolic adjustment to the patriarchal culture.
Here I have found Lucia Marcucci using the expression “the virus of hope” and rejecting perfection. Courtesy the artist and Frittelli Arte Contemporanea, Firenze.Īnecdote: once I was talking to a philosopher and I used the word “hope.” He told me-well, I wouldn’t call it hope, it sounds religious to me. Lucia Marcucci, Il destino è nelle vostre mani, 1964. It’s about what’s familiar more than what belongs to the Family (intended as in the conventional sense of biological family). She can be both symbolical and allegorical, starting off in close contact to her body and to the household, she leaves it without abandoning it, nor denying it. She comes in and out the image, she stitches and unstitches by necessity she strikes. She’s not the woman or the artist of the “I” but she is the artist of the “You.” She draws patterns, gesticulates, counts, she juxtaposes and overlaps languages she diversifies. This woman is a woman that writes, prints, takes notes- takes the note and breaks it -sings, shouts, whispers, takes the technique and makes it her own, composes, answers to the world around her-because she feels and listens (in Italian they’d both be sente, both for sentiment and the act of listening), she opens up, cuts up, glues, deletes, and changes her mind.
Many of the presented works are unsophisticated and intuitive in form. Nobody before them could ever do what they did in the way they did it. So these women artists are by necessity frontrunners. Before that time, those women-women like me, were either housewives or mothers, or anyway objectified, and considered to be worth not even half of their male counterparts, at least in Italy (already the fact that they were destined to have a counterpart either in a male or in religious commitment disturbs me enough). We can call these languages and gestures “unprecedented” because the historical period in question is the 70s. This is a path that speaks of unprecedented languages and gestures, thus of liberation of a specific category of bodies, namely women. Here a sentimental review, followed by a short interview with the curators of the exhibition. Curated by Raffaella Perna and Marco Scotini, the exhibition The Unexpected Subject proposes for the first time a wide-ranging investigation and a precise reconstruction of the relationship between visual arts and feminist movement in Italy, identifying in 1978 the catalyst year of all energies in play (not only in Italy).
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