In collaboration with the humanities studies and the philosophy departments of Università degli Studi Roma Tre
From her artistic beginnings at the time of the Forma manifesto, Carla Accardi was an intensely political artist, attentive to both Italian and international current affairs. Throughout the 1970s, her engagement gave rise to two substantially different feminist experiences. In 1970, she was among the founders – alongside Carla Lonzi and Elvira Banotti – of Rivolta Femminile, one of the first and most radical groups of Italian feminism. In 1976, together with a group of women – mostly artists – she established the Cooperativa di Via del Beato Angelico to promote and disseminate women’s creative work. The study day aims to retrace that era from various disciplinary perspectives, focussing on the relationships between artistic practice and feminism, ultimately highlighting the centrality of Carla Accardi’s commitment within the contemporary panorama.
Image: Carla Accardi, Autoritratto, 1946, oil on canvas, cm 31 x 23, Archivio Accardi Sanfilippo
© Carla Accardi by SIAE 2024
Program
Laura iamurri
“Dimenticare. Mettersi in salvo”. Accardi, Lonzi e le asperità del femminismo (“Forgetting. Saving oneself”. Accardi, Lonzi and the asperities of feminism)
Dimenticare, mettersi in salvo is the title of a work from 1978, the year in which the activities of the Cooperativa di Via del Beato Angelico came to an end and Carla Accardi stepped away from feminism and the political engagement she had embarked on with Carla Lonzi. Their friendship, alongside their critical and political engagement, had begun around the mid-1960s and had developed into a feminine space of reflection manifested in the “Discorsi” published in the periodical Marcatré or in the volume Autoritratto. At the end of the decade, Accardi and Lonzi, along with Elvira Banotti, founded Rivolta Femminile. Within the group’s activities, resolutely aimed at deconstructing patriarchal culture, divergencies emerged over time around the relationship with art. These gradually became irreconcilable, ultimately leading Carla Accardi to leave the group and end her relationship with Carla Lonzi.
Laura Iamurri teaches contemporary art history at Università Roma Tre. Her publications include the edition of Carla Lonzi’s Scritti sull’arte (with Lara Conte and Vanessa Martini, et. al, 2012); Un margine che sfugge. Carla Lonzi e l’arte in Italia, 1955-1970 (Quodlibet, 2016). She has also published several essays on Carla Acardi and the relation between art and feminism in 1970s Italy.
Paola Stelliferi
Dai margini al centro: rivolte femministe nell’Italia degli anni Settanta (From margin to centre: feminist uprisings in 1970s Italy)
Since it was first coined at the end of the 19th Century, the term “feminism” has not indicated a static, monolithic, universal or geographically located movement, but rather a choral, multifaceted, networked political phenomenon capable of activating – according to context – different critical processes of redefining the political. The history of the Rivolta Femminile collective (founded in Rome between 1969 and 1970) will therefore be contextualised within the polychromatic and articulated panorama of feminisms of the 1970s, which in Italy were characterised by a peculiar intertwining of local, national and transnational dimensions, often subverting the hierarchy between centre and periphery.
Historian Paola Stelliferi is currently a research fellow at the Università di Padova, specialised in women’s and gender history. Her publications include Il femminismo a Roma negli anni Settanta. Percorsi, esperienze e memorie dei collettivi di quartiere (Bononia University Press, 2015); with Alessandra Gissi, L’aborto. Una storia (Carocci, 2023).
Daniela Angelucci
Macchine astratte e impulso vitale (Abstract machines and vital impulse)
In Carla Accardi’s work, the choice of abstraction has precise political and theoretical motivations, primarily to do with the need to distance herself from traditional iconography and the male canon. At the same time, the goal indicated by the artist herself as the purpose of her activity was her need to grasp the flow of life, to “represent the vital impulse of the world”. But how to reconcile life and abstraction? The notion of abstract machine proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari can help understand this connection, beginning with what Carla Lonzi – writing about Carla Accardi – described as “the neurotic humanistic presence at the centre of the universe”.
Daniela Angelucci teaches aesthetics at Università Roma Tre. She is co-director of the Environmental Humanities master’s programme – Studi dell'ambiente e del territorio. Her publications include Deleuze e i concetti del cinema (Quodlibet, 2012), Filosofia del cinema (Carocci, 2013), Là fuori. La filosofia e il reale (ombre corte, 2023).
Maria Bremer
“Un viaggio privato nello spazio culturale”. Carla Accardi, Origine, 1976 (“A private journey within the cultural space”. Carla Accardi, Origine, 1976)
Within the context of Carla Accardi’s abstract work, the multimedia installation Origine – which features private photographs taken from the artist’s family context – is an exception in formal terms. This lecture aims to go beyond a simple autobiographical reading, analysing the first public presentation of the installation during the eponymous exhibition at the gallery of the Cooperativa di Via del Beato Angelico in Rome, in May 1976. The study of Origine as an independently organised exhibition will allow us to specify Carla Accardi’s stance in her dual role of woman and artist within the context of the feminist movement of the 1970s.
Maria Bremer is a postdoctoral researcher (Akademische Rätin a. Z.) at the Ruhr-Universität of Bochum. Spanning art history and cultural studies – including curatorial and gender studies – her research focuses on the historiographical dimension of exhibition practices.
Eva Menzio (connected remotely)
Testimonianza sulla Cooperativa di via del Beato Angelico (Personal account of the Cooperativa di Via del Beato Angelico)
Eva Menzio is one of the founders of the Cooperativa di Via del Beato Angelico. She curated the inaugural exhibition – dedicated to Artemisia Gentileschi in April 1976 – of this space, which was created to “present (…), study, collect, document” female creativity. Daniela Lancioni will invite Eva Menzio to provide her testimony on the establishment of the Cooperativa, the Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition and on Carla Accardi’s work Origine.
The Galleria Eva Menzio was active in Turin between 1980 and 1987. Subsequently, Eva Menzio directed the Galerie Marlborough in Monaco, in the Principality of Monaco.
Suzanne Santoro
Testimonianza sulla Cooperativa di via del Beato Angelico (Personal account of the Cooperativa di Via del Beato Angelico)
Together with Carla Accardi, Nilde Carabba, Franca Chiabra, Anna Maria Colucci, Regina Della Noce, Nedda Guidi, Teresa Montemaggiori, Stephanie Ousler and Silvia Truppi, Suzanne Santoro is one of the artists who founded the Cooperativa di Via del Beato Angelico. In conversation with Daniela Lancioni, she will look back at the most salient moments of that experience.
Suzanne Santoro is an American artist who has lived in Italy since the late 1960s. She was part of Rivolta Femminile and in 1976 was one of the founders of the Cooperativa di via del Beato Angelico.
Lara Conte
“Un’età indefinita che non è la mia cronologia”. Carla Accardi nel contesto espositivo contemporaneo (“An indefinite age that is not my chronology”. Carla Accardi in the contemporary exhibition context)
Throughout her life, Carla Accardi frequently engaged in dialogue with intellectuals, artists and younger generations of artists. In recent years, her research has occupied a central position in exhibitions which explore the relationship between art and feminism in the contemporary scene. Such exhibitions have tended not to confine the discourse to historiographical investigation, prompting also a reflection on the relationship between current events and history of art, beginning with the dimension of female genealogy understood as the possibility to “find, rediscover, invent” (Luce Irigaray). The contribution will begin by analysing these exhibition episodes in order to focus on the relevance of Carla Accardi’s research and her relationship with contemporary artistic practices, as well as to reflect on genealogy as a theoretical perspective of feminist inquiry. A perspective which disintegrates the linear and consequential narrative of facts, events, definitions.
Lara Conte teaches contemporary art history at Università Roma Tre. With Cecilia Canziani and Paola Ugolini, she curated the exhibition Io dico io / I say I (Galleria Nazionale, Rome, 2021). She is part of the research group “PRIN 2020 - La fotografia femminista italiana. Politiche identitarie e strategie di genere”.
Giorgia Gastaldon
“Penso che l’astrazione sia stata favorevole per me in quanto donna”: strategie femministe nella pittura astratta degli anni Settanta di Carla Accardi (“As a woman, I believe abstraction is suited to me”: feminist strategies in the 1960s abstract painting of Carla Accardi)
Carla Accardi opted for abstract painting from the start of her career, stating that she had always regarded this dimension to be more favourable to women artists, primarily because it lacks iconographic elements traditionally dedicated to male achievements. In the 1970s, the artist was engaged in feminism while simultaneously working on the Trasparenti and Lenzuoli series, which are interpreted here in light of a possible ideological and operational connection with her militant ideas.
Giorgia Gastaldon is a researcher in contemporary art history at the Università dell’Insubria and scientific curator of the project “Italian Council Now we have seen. Women and Art in the Seventies in Italy” at Rome’s Bibliotheca Hertziana.
Elena Di Raddo
L’arte astratta è maschile o femminile? Qualche riflessione (Is abstract art male or female? Some reflections)
The talk will attempt to answer why – with few exceptions – abstract art created by women has remained on the margins of art history for so long. The years of feminism contributed to lifting many prominent women artists out of anonymity, but did not favour those who chose abstraction. For a long time and more so than with other genres, this artistic language has consequently been associated with male figures in both art history books and retrospective exhibitions. The reasons for this are historical, as well as theoretical and formal.
Elena Di Raddo teaches contemporary art history at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan and Brescia. Her publications include Astratte. Donne e astrazione in Italia 1930-2000 (Antiga 2022); with Bianca Trevisan, Astratte. Nuove ricerche sull’astrazione delle donne tra avanguardia e neoavanguardia in Italia (Electa, 2023).
Informazioni
Admission free with reservation
Auditorium - Palazzo Esposizioni Roma
Admission via steps in via Milano 9a