CARLA FRACCI

2001

The biggest grazie of all goes to Marina and Lorenzo. Without them, I would never have even tried to understand Milan, let alone stayed long enough to study this strange and most enigmatic of cities, its peripheries and its inhabitants. This book is dedicated to them, with love.

2020

For several years now, the name of Carla Lonzi has been breaking out in art history after a comparatively long-time silence. Art critic, poet and feminist, Lonzi’s work evades easy definitions. Renewed interest in her writing led to two major scholarly publications written in Italian, alongside international responses from contemporary art historians, curators, artist exhibitions, conferences and reading groups. This recent attention to Lonzi has instigated new conversations around radical feminism, contributing to the delinking of an Anglo-American canon frequently associated with major accounts of the feminist movement in art. The developing discourse has also, and this is crucial, started to disseminate a feminist vocabulary that produces dissonances within mainstream strategies of presenting the relationship between art and feminism in the contemporary art world across generations and geographies.

Maria Bremer, BOOK REVIEW Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi, Third Text Online, http://www.thirdtext.org/bremer-carlalonzi, 22 October 2021

Responding to specific contemporary challenges posed by ecological threat, decolonial movements, global capitalism, and the ensuing entanglement of gender, ethnicity and class, feminist perspectives have recently integrated notions of intersectionality and positionality, while revising materialist and semiotic trajectories and developing material culture approaches. The expanding spectrum of feminist concerns has concomitantly put the historiography of feminism to the test, leading to the uncovering of blind spots and biases. Under a self-reflexive lens, persisting anglophone and Western foci, as well as universalising presumptions of an undifferentiated gender experience across class, ethnic and national divides, have come to the fore. Against this backdrop, a renewed historiographical engagement with Western second-wave feminism requires a questioning, rather than a replication, of homogenising epistemic categories and comprehensive narratives. 1 It is in this vein of thought that the volume Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi, edited by art historians Francesco Ventrella and

Thanks to the contribution provided by some of the most qualified specialists in Milanese history, this companion offers an agile synopsis of the city’s social organization and its cultural identity. The focus is on historical actors, places and circumstances in which clearly emerge the typical traits of the urban community. Its natural openness to the new and the spirit of assimilation were able to trasform Milan in the core of an extremely dynamic development based on funding values set on a huge tradition. And finally they allowed the city to gain a leading role as a European metropolis that accomplished a centuries-old historical vocation.

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2011

‘‘Spaces of self-consciousness’’ examines three environments created by the Italian artist Carla Accardi in light of an emerging feminist politics. Though better known as a painter, Accardi created these three-dimensional works during an era of political and social upheaval in which her own commitment to the Italian feminist movement began to take shape. Her environments were deeply imbricated both with her own experience of autocoscienza, or consciousness-raising, as well as with radical design proposals that rejected the current state of civilization. This article examines how these environments functioned as prototypes of the transient, anti-institutional spaces that she would later create as co-founder of Rivolta femminile, a historic Italian feminist collective, and examines a previously obscure moment in Carla Accardi’s career.

Palinsesti (8), 2019

This paper reconsiders the so far undervalued importance of Carla Accardi’s solo exhibition Origine, mounted in May 1976 at a women’s cooperative co-founded by the artist at Via Beato Angelico 18 in Rome. At its all but neutral location, I argue, the self-curated exhibition, encompassing a larger display of Accardi’s work, rendered visible the private and political entanglement of her artistic practice, significantly expanding its potential meaning. In engaging with the exhibition’s precarious documentation and critical coverage, I will demonstrate that on this occasion, rather than providing a conventional overview of stylistic developments, Accardi temporarily staged, in Foucault’s sense, a context of origin for her becoming in the present: as woman and artist.

Urban History, 1999

This article examines the changing images of the city of Milan over a period of two decades spanning the 1980s and 1990s. The article considers theoretical debates concerning city images. Milan is then analysed through the various spatial forms which encompass this modern city – political space, populated space, geographic space, urban space and economic space. The next section assesses the changing images of the city through shifting historical phases and crises. Finally the article draws together the fundamental economic and social changes which have marked the deindustrialization and reinvention of Milan.

The high-rise not only gives a recognizable image to urban space, but also represents a mode of living in the big city. This paper concentrates on the representation of Milan through the high-rise in post-World War II film. Images from films ranging from Ragazze d’oggi (Luigi Zampa. 1955) to Milano Nera (Gian Rocco and Pino Serpi, 1961) and La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961) will be discussed. Representation is understood here as a model for living in the city, so that the built goes beyond the strictly material. It is through film that the cultural associations present in the image of the skyscraper can be acted out. These associations are approached as dream-like narratives in which spaces are layered. The new projects over the old, which remains present and at times visible, depending upon the perspective given.