La Passione: Artist talk and book launch

Welcome to the final event in the public programme of the exhibition project La Passione

On the occasion of the book launch of Carla Lonzi’s Two Manifestos for the Women’s Revolt translated into Norwegian for the first time, renowned artist Silvia Giambrone will be in conversation with performance artist Marianne Heier. The event will commence with a short artist talk by Giambrone, who will present her practice and speak about her work Everyday Dicks (2023) within the exhibition, as well as her relation to the legacy of Lonzi’s social and theoretical aspirations and her longterm commitment to the discourses of the feminist movement. The conversation will address the resurgent visibility of gender violence in Italy and elsewhere, its escalation in a time of fascist politics, and in a cultural determination based on biases of gendered oppression.

Silvia Giambrone (b. 1981 in Agrigento)’s practice encompasses performance, installation, photography, sculpture and sound. She is concerned with what she calls ‘the politics of the body’, with a particular focus on violence against women, both physical and psychological. Through direct confrontation, she seeks to understand and reveal cultural tendencies towards brutal behavior, while questioning the domestication and normalisation of violence. Giambrone’s work has been exhibited widely in Italy and internationally and has been recognized by a number of awards. Silvia Giambrone lives and works in Rome and London.

For the first time, two radical feminist manifestos by Carla Lonzi are presented in Norwegian language. The texts in this book, published by Existenz, are from 1970 and 1978 respectively, do not seek a dialogue but rupture: these are vociferous, unreservedly confrontational interventions in a general culture of consensus. The radically utopian, visionary content of Lonzi’s texts has influenced feminists far beyond Italy’s borders, and continues to inspire theorists, artists, activists and politicians to this day.

La Passione is a research-based endeavour project that stems from several years of conversations between the artist and Fotogalleriet about Italian radical feminism and its special, close relationship with the visual arts and, especially photography. Consisting of an intergenerational and transhistorical overview —archival documentation, artworks, notes and other material— this unique presentation aims to shed light on cogent contemporary issues of biased genders’ norms and current resurging fascisms, in Italy and abroad, to address structural violence and where we decide to stand today.

The exhibition brings and bridges Italian feminist history into Norway to point out that the equality struggle never ended, and still, to the decades past the achievement of equal and fundamental gender rights in the 1970s, from this day, feminicide and violence against women and gender non-conforming bodies remains the unquestioned standard unconnected to forceful family ties, a dictatorship of gender and reproduction bundle by a pretense of tradition and traditional families.

Thank you to Istituto Italiano di Cultura and Arts and Culture Norway.