MILAN.- Curated by artist, poet and performer Mirella Bentivoglio (Klagenfurt, 1922 – Rome, 2017), the exhibition Materializzazione del linguaggio (Materialization of language) opened on 20 September 1978 at the Magazzini del Sale alle Zattere on the occasion of the XXXVIII Venice Biennale.

The exhibition comprised a selection of heterogeneous materials and practices reifying a more ample reflection on the ‘relationship between women and language’. A language was thus coined that was an expression of the ‘unconditioned and transgressive’ characteristic of the verbal-visual research of 90 international female artists and poets active at the time.

Poetic expression and critical awareness unfolded in opposition to patriarchal languages and took the form of visual and textual works, including poetry and prose books, artist’s books, embroideries, live performances, videos, drawings, graphics, notes, scribbles, sheets and papers.

In so far as the show included images of self-representation, traces of memory and performing bodies, it acted as a "reconnaissance", a "census" and an "archive" at once.




In so doing, the exhibition blurred the divide between the work and the document, between the three-dimensionality of the exhibition and the twodimensionality of the publication, between the verticality of the museum wall and the horizontality of the archival showcase. By thickening the unpredictable relationship between the artefactual and the factual, the linguistic research underlying the show ran parallel to an affirmation of identity, to a path that was equally intellectual and political. It is perhaps no coincidence that in 1978, writer and art critic Carla Lonzi (Florence, 1931- Milan, 1982) published Taci, anzi parla. Diary of a feminist. Lonzi was a theoretician of self-consciousness and sexual difference as well as co-founder in the 1970s of the group, manifesto and publishing house Rivolta femminile.

Albeit with a certain delay, Materializzazione del linguaggio embedded feminine and feminist artistic practices within the discourse of the Venice Biennale. Because they were perceived as secondary instantiations, however, the above practices became marginalized and were ultimately elided from the canon.

Re-Materialization of Language. 1978-2022 - the first group exhibition organised by the Antonio Dalle Nogare Foundation – is conceived as a first attempt at a philological reconstruction of the original exhibition. A reactivation and re-contextualization of the original historical instances takes place for the centenary of Bentivoglio’s birth.

The exhibition – curated by Cristiana Perrella and Andrea Viliani with the associate curator Vittoria Pavesi – will present a selection of the works originally exhibited in the 1970s alongside contemporary pieces and partially unpublished documents (including catalogue, poster, installation views, photographs of the opening and of the performances) in a new display conceived by architect and artist Matilde Cassani.

The exhibition’s display, based on the alphabetical taxonomy of an archive, could be considered as the starting point for imagining, creating and sharing further alphabets and therefore additional narratives, which will involve the visitors too. Moreover, the matrix of the alphabet is the one which all the artists in the show use as a starting point in their works as well, in order to own it, subvert it and re-found it.

The language of the show will ‘re-materialize’ episodically on the cast of the original exhibition the interventions of three contemporary female artists — Monica Bonvicini (Venice, 1965), BRACHA (Bracha L. Ettinger, Tel Aviv, 1948) and Nora Turato (Zagreb, 1991) — and a series of digital and live events. Therefore, Re-Materialization of Language. 1978 -2022 is shaped as a dialogue that, quite simply, is still going on today.