Fondazione Sabe per l’arte Ravenna completes the current year’s exhibition program with the exhibition “PHOTOGRAPHY AND FEMINISMS. Stories and images from the Donata Pizzi Collection” curated by Federica Muzzarelli, the last of a trilogy of projects entirely dedicated to photography. After the group exhibition “In suspensus” involving the works of Carlo Benvenuto, Enrico Cattaneo and Elena Modorati in the exploration of the concept of imitation in comparison with painting and the solo exhibition by Massimo Baldini “Italia Revisited” focused on the relationship with the landscape, the sociological and political aspect of this medium in relation to identity and gender practices is now called into question. The relationship between photography and feminism, both born in the first half of the 19th century, has had different declinations depending on the contexts and eras, whose common thread is the ability of photography to constitute for women a space of freedom of existence and expression that was long denied to them in other areas. Feminism in photography, therefore, not as a revenge of a feminine art understood in an essentialist sense, but as the possibility of militate in the world by speaking of body, action, emancipation, criticism of stereotypes (and also egocentrism) thanks to the freedom of a medium that for a long time was not burdened by stringent academic and systemic rules.
AA.VV., “FOTOGRAFIE E FEMMINISMI. Storie e immagini dalla Collezione Donata Pizzi”, installation view, photo Daniele Casadio, courtesy Fondazione SABE per l’arte, Ravenna
This approach can be traced back to the five thematic sections into which the exhibition is divided (Family Album, Gender Identities, Stereotypes and Domestic Spaces, Social Roles and Censorship, Feminist Books and Objects), in each of which (except the last one, which is documentary) a historicized figure is placed in dialogue with more recent researches, demonstrating how, decades later, photography continues to prove to be an effective tool in addressing issues that are always current as they persist over the years. The works on display all come from the collection of Donata Pizzi, an enlightened photography expert who in 2013 began a systematic acquisition of the most representative images of female photography. The project, initially born with the aim of filling a gap in the valorization of Italian photography that was still too little known at a national and international level, immediately clarified its exclusive focus on female authors, whose work, in her opinion, is more interesting than that of their male colleagues who are better known to the general public. The collection currently consists of approximately 300 images taken by 90 different photographers from the 1960s to the present and is accessible in digital format on a dedicated website that accompanies each work with a bilingual documentary apparatus. The exhibition in Ravenna is part of a broader project aimed at making the collection known abroad through a structured collaboration with cultural institutes and in Italy with the opening, hoped for 2025, of a physical space in Rome in which the collection and the bibliographic apparatus connected to it can be accessible to the public.
AA.VV., “FOTOGRAFIE E FEMMINISMI. Storie e immagini dalla Collezione Donata Pizzi”, installation view, photo Daniele Casadio, courtesy Fondazione SABE per l’arte, Ravenna
The driving force of the exhibition (and also the first inspiration for the collection project) is the table with anastatic reproductions of the original maquettes of the historic volume on feminist creative practices “Ci vedo mercoledì, gli altri giorni ci immaginamo” published in 1978 by Mazzotta. The book, signed by the photographers who made up the so called “Wednesday group” (Adriana Monti, Bundi Alberti, Diana Bond, Esperanza Nunez, Mercedes Cuman, Paola Mattioli and Silvia Truppi), was born as a restitution of their experience of a regular meeting in which they could confront themselves as women and as artists in a sort of self-awareness practise through images in which the exchange of professional ideas was inextricably linked to political militancy and the autobiographical dimension. If at the time the publication was not successful, today it is a precious testimony to an unrepeatable epochal juncture, in which the connection between art and life was the main way of affirming and disseminating a marginalized identity. Another central work is the object-photograph “Cosa ne pensi del movimento femminista?” (What do you think of the feminist movement?) from 1974 by Paola Mattioli, a cosmetics container belonging to her mother (the first female magistrate in Italy) lined internally with photographs of the first feminist demonstration in Milan.
Lisetta Carmi, from the “I Travestiti” series, 1965-1970. Gelatin silver bromide print, 18×24 cm, Martini & Ronchetti, courtesy Archivio Lisetta Carmi
Among the most iconic historical works on display we find some shots from the “I Travestiti” series (1965-1970) by Lisetta Carmi, one of the most intense and important reportages in the history of photography, the result of the artist’s sensitive frequentation of their private homes in the alleys of the former Jewish ghetto in Genoa. The shots document the need for everyday life and normality of these outcasts forced to live in a specific neighborhood, a world made of house parties, démodé furnishings, trinkets, pearl necklaces and tea with friends. Here too, the first edition of the resulting book, published in 1972 by Sergio Donnabella, for the publishing house Essedì (created specifically for this publication that had been rejected by other publishers) and now a cult object, was rejected by bookshops as scandalous and most of the copies ended up in the waste paper bin.
Alessandra Spranzi, “Cose che accadono” #12, 2002-2005, c-print on forex, 40,5×61 cm
The works created in the liveliest years of the protest dialogue in the exhibition with those of the younger generations who, although apparently very distant in terms of aesthetics and militant commitment from the former, upon closer inspection reveal themselves to be equally significant in recounting, with a more conceptual and abstract language, the evolution of society from a female point of view. Among these we mention the shots pervaded by disturbing spells by Alessandra Spranzi, who is used to recreating surreal situations through out-of-control domestic objects that transform the familiar habitat of the house into a dangerously mysterious environment, the socio-visual investigation in cyanotype by Giulia Iacolutti on the trans inmates of a male penitentiary in Mexico City in which prison detention overlaps with the additional male body-prison and the self-portraits by Alba Zari, a travel diary in search of her origins in which the artist scans the image of her face, excluding the features transmitted by her mother to highlight those inherited from her father she never knew.
Info:
FOTOGRAFIA E FEMMINISMI. Storie e immagini dalla Collezione Donata Pizzi
curated by Federica Muzzarelli
5/10 – 15/12/2024
Fondazione Sabe per l’arte
Via Giovanni Pascoli 31, Ravenna
www.sabeperlarte.org
www.collezionedonatapizzi.com
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
NO COMMENT