DWF / Mostrare il cambiamento. Donne politica spettacolo II, 2006, n. 1 (69)
january-march
DWF / Mostrare il cambiamento. Donne politica spettacolo I, 2005, n. 4 (68) october-december
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Mostrare il cambiamento on the web
EDITORIAL NOTE, by Paola Bono
MATERIA
POLIEDRA
SELECTA
Making visible the invisible: Marina Abramovic´’s political body
by Cristina Demaria
Read the article in italian complete version
How can a performance turn a feminine body into a political body, thus making
visible and, possibly, deconstructable, the stereotypes attached to it? How can an
artistic practice – centred on the body – propose new readings of the subjectivity
anchored in that body? Starting from these questions, the article focuses on some
performances by Marina Abramovic´, a Serbian visual artist born in Montenegro,
who now lives in Amsterdam. It explores the “body art” experiments with pain
of the Seventies, up to her works dedicated to the conflicts in the Balkans, and
to the “relational objects” of the Nineties.
In trying to show how the body becomes, in each single case, a text to write, and from which to start to re-write meanings and relationship, the article indicates how Abramovic´’s perfomances could be unique and original examples of how feminine identity could be displaced, and thus re-placed (re-performed), in a political body (or a body politics) which escapes every specific “ideology of the visible”.
Werewere Liking: an art of desire
by Sara Tagliacozzo
Werewere Liking is a writer and artist from Cameroon who founded an artists’ urban community, Ki-Yi Village, in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in 1985. This community has become famous mostly for its theatre, which is a very interesting case of synthesis between Liking’s theoretical reflections on society’s change and regeneration, and the social experience of the community itself. For almost twenty years this group has played an important part in the African “struggle of identifications” (Bhabha), resisting the hegemony of a nationalist and masculine discourse.
The strict relationship between Liking’s discourse and the Ki-Yi Village’s experimentation of it has led me to consider the whole phenomenon (discourse, social practice and artistic work) as a kind of prophetic movement. Liking’s prophetism has however revealed itself to be of a particular kind: an artistic prophetism. The core of its prophecy is the role of the arts, and of creativity, in the process of regeneration in contemporary African societies.
Caryl Churchill: in the context of History
by Cristina Polverini
The late Sixties and the Seventies are a period of great change in all the Western world; the student movement, the peace movement, feminism… and a widespread will to experiment, which of course made itself felt in every artistic field. For the English playwright Caryl Churchill, the Seventies were also a turning point, personally and professionally, due to her working with two theatre companies – Monstrous Regiment and Joint Stock – who were both politically engaged and eager to experiment with new forms and new techniques.
(a cura di) GIULIA FANARA e FEDERICA GIOVANNELLI, Eretiche ed erotiche. Le donne, le idee, il cinema, Napoli, Liguori, 2004, pp. 487
rev. by Festinese