Elena Ferrante’s wildly successful Neapolitan novels, for instance, have been read as a take on the feminist practice of affidamento, or entrustment, between two life-long female friends, in which the differences (or disparities) between two women are a generative source of sustenance and recognition. Photos courtesy of Raffaella Perna.Ĭurated by Marco Scotini and Raffaella Perna, the exhibition’s global address speaks to a wider resurgence of interest in the practices of 1970s Italian feminism, both within and outside Italy. Installation shot, FM Centre for Contemporary Art. ![]() As a visual arts exhibition that incorporated archival materials, video, ephemera, textiles and sound, alongside the more conventional fine art modes of collage, sculpture, painting and photography, the show navigated these two drives while also attempting to translate the particularities of Italian feminist thinking for a wide, implicitly international audience. Austin would describe as new visual, verbal, textual and performative utterances to signify female subjectivity and sexual difference, while on the other, figures like the art critic Carla Lonzi insisted that de-culturation (the un-learning of male culture) and “dropping out” were the only strategies through which women could achieve freedom. ![]() On the one hand, artists, philosophers and writers sought to generate what J.L. A contradictory impulse lies at the heart of this historical moment in Italian feminist practices. Photos courtesy of Raffaella Perna.īut if the unexpected subject can be uttered and heard, it is less clear how it comes to be seen, especially when, as so many Italian feminists of the 1970s pointed out, the visual codes for women’s subjectivity were (and one could argue still are) constrained by patriarchal modes of representation. Installation shot, featuring Mirella Bentivoglio’s AM – (ti amo) (1970). Acting becomes simple and elementary.” The Unexpected Subject “e are the Unexpected Subject… An entirely new world is being put forward by an entirely new subject. ![]() “Not being trapped within the master-slave dialectic, we become conscious of ourselves,” they wrote. But it also calls to mind the words of the Rivolta Femminile, a feminist collective founded by Carla Lonzi, Carla Accardi and Elvira Banotti that, between 1970 and 74, self-published a series of essays condemning the omission of women from Western philosophy and communist politics, and argued for the vital force of language, both written and spoken, in constituting women’s identity. A Letraset collage on cardboard created by the Rome-based artist and curator Mirella Bentivoglio and titled AM – (ti amo) (1970), the visual poem conjures up the way that identity is constituted: every “I” must have a “you” to address itself to. Superimposed in a diagonal line, the words “ti AM O” (a play on “I love you” in Italian) articulated the lips’ unheard utterance. Photos courtesy of Raffaella Perna.įM Centre for Contemporary Art, Via Giovanni Battista Piranesi 10, MilanĪ mouth, open wide and mid-speech, hovered over a black ground on the enormous banner hanging above the entrance to the FM Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea in Milan, soundlessly announcing the exhibition The Unexpected Subject: 1978 Art and Feminism in Italy.
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