The exhibition “L’Offesa” at Ar/Ge Kunst reinterprets some of the works of artist Lucia Marcucci (Florence, 1933) created since the 1960s, exploring the verbo-visual side of aural poetry, cine-poetry and non-linear editing techniques, also through the contribution of a number of contemporary voices (Wissal Houbabi, Elena Biserna and Annamaria Ajmone with Laura Agnusdei).
It was 1964 when artist Lucia Marcucci created the work Il fidanzato in fuga: a collage on cardboard depicting three freestanding spacesuits, as if attached to clothes hangers, bodyless. The collage reads: “Paradiso extraterrestre della donna, il fidanzato in fuga nello spazio” (“A woman’s extra-terrestrial paradise: a boyfriend on the run in space”). An ironic and provocatory phrase, denouncing the condition of contemporary women and showcasing their need for freedom and transgression, from within a society obsessed with scientific and technological progress and during the time in constant ascent towards the ‘conquest’ of space. The following year, as part of Gruppo ’70, with Eugenio Miccini, Lamberto Pignotti and Antonio Bueno, Lucia Marcucci put up posters and then ripped them, including the poster L’Offesa, during their poetry shows Poesie e no (1964–1967). These were a series of multimedia happenings featuring poems as well as non-literary material. The events, particularly Poesie and no 3 (1965), drew on a range of languages – poetry readings, newspaper columns, slogans, extracts from novels, experimental film screenings and other ephemeral and volatile actions – to the music of Giuseppe Chiari. It was all put together within a Cubist-style collage of words and recitals, clips, scraps and offcuts, moving away from the linear construction of content.
Lucia Marcucci stood out by virtue of her table-turning of the poetic word, which became part of the feminist struggles in the 1960s. What the artist defines as “returning the lexicon to sender” means exploiting language with irony to pursue a critical redemption of stereotypes, of gender and the assumptions regulating representation of the female body, and of the forms and habits imposed upon it by capitalist society. Like in Lucia Marcucci’s work, the word is brought back to the streets, squares and venues where civic relations might established, and bodies along with them.
On the occasion of the artist’s ninetieth birthday, the exhibition “L’Offesa” at Ar/Ge Kunst retraces some of the artist’s works from the 1960s up to the 1990s on loan from the Lucia Marcucci Archive and the Frittelli Arte Contemporanea Gallery. The exhibition re-examines how speech, advertising, media and paper were questioned in the 1960s and 1970s through militant practices intensifying verbal and bodily presence.
Curated by
Francesca Verga and Zasha Colah
at Ar/Ge Kunst, Bolzano
until July 29, 2023