culturae: florum omnium varietas (nascita)

The everyday schizophrenia of women

“A fighter is never a virgin.

Allogene (from the Greek word that means “belonging to different race”) by nature, these five female artists, with whom I wanted to adopt a common line of work for Ipotesi ’80 in Bari, present a series of works I would not define “open”: actually, they are as closed as a fist, as to describe the explosive growth of art-making by females and of politics addressed to women.

It is not about loving songs of surrender, or moralizing madrigals, but rather brave tokens of human condition, clearly or even violently painful – depending on the case – offered or pronounced with the savagery often associated with innocence.

All these artworks share the style and sentiment of a diary, and as diaries they open up a dimension of void, they are able to challenge the pantomime of human relationships, to unveil the deceit of everyday life.

It’s a genetic, evolutional map, the anxious, shrewd research conducted by Amalia Del Ponte on the mother-daughter relationship. It’s an album, the album par excellence, a book collecting pictures, drawings, memories. But it’s also a map, the chronicle of nine years of life together, the story of a duality, of the pairing of two entities bounded by a relationship that is essential for both; the detailed topography (a map, precisely) of a limited territory. Between mother and daughter nothing goes unnoticed, everything is recorded and sometimes transfigured into a magnetic field crossed by aggressive, affectionate drives.

Del Ponte actually did something similar in 1974, for a solo show in Milan, when she wrote: “I am preparing maps intended as images of mental and geographic routes; as if searching for things in such a way that personal experience also becomes shared experience”. In the text titled «The crystal as a rediscovered body of information», she spoke «of the ancient, violent separation history/life/subject/environment/pleasure/reality, beyond any schizophrenic dualism». In order to exist (or at least try to) without having to endure a broken heart”.

Lea Vergine