Fondazione In Between Art Film presents Italian Female Filmmakers in the Sixties and Seventies: Lives, Histories, and Identities, a volume devoted to the film, documentary and video production made by female artists and filmmakers active in Italy between the 1960s and 1970s. The editorial project, published by LENZ, is part of the Foundation’s path aimed at promoting the culture of moving images and deepening the ways through which they can be historicized, interpreted and reread in light of contemporary transformations of audiovisual language.
The volume is edited by Carla Subrizi, Paola Ugolini and Maria Alicata and proposes a survey of the practices developed by pioneering figures who have traversed the territories of art and cinema, using the film medium as a space for experimentation, critical observation and speaking out. The historical context of reference is that of a period marked by profound social, cultural and political transformations, in which artistic practices often dialogued with protest movements and changing models of representation.
Through an articulated critical and theoretical framework, the book also analyzes the technological transformations that affected film and video production during the second half of the twentieth century. The focus is on the urgency, expressed by many female artists and filmmakers, to redefine visual languages and narrative structures, intervening in the ways in which individual and collective identities are constructed. The volume collects eighteen essays commissioned for publication, which explore the work of authors such as Giosetta Fioroni, Ketty La Rocca, Marisa Merz, Gina Pane, Marinella Pirelli, Cecilia Mangini and Angela Ricci Lucchi, along with other protagonists of a significant season of Italian visual culture.
The editorial project includes an iconographic apparatus composed of images and archival documents, some of them previously unpublished, that help to restore the complexity of the practices analyzed. The aim is to highlight the role played by these artists in the renewal of the language of moving images, highlighting the intertwining of artistic research, visual experimentation and the political dimension. The publication also offers a broad survey of works, relationships and contexts that have contributed to the visual culture of the second half of the 20th century, but which have not yet found a stable place within artistic historiography.
The contributions collected in the volume are signed by scholars, researchers and art historians, including Maria Alicata, Lucia Aspesi, Silvia Bottinelli, Lara Conte, Flavia Frigeri, Francesca Gallo, Sharon Hecker, Laura Iamurri, Caterina Iaquinta, Teresa Kittler, Jennifer Malvezzi, Iolanda Ratti with Giulia Kimberly Colombo, Carla Subrizi, Paola Ugolini, Valentine Umansky and Giovanna Zapperi. The analyses reconstruct a panorama of experiences that developed in parallel with the social movements and political transformations of the 1960s and 1970s, outlining a female genealogy of moving images that the volume proposes as a key to understanding some of the dynamics of contemporary visual culture.
With this publication, the In Between Art Film Foundation continues its activities to support the culture of moving images, placing alongside the production of contemporary works a critical reflection on the historical and artistic genealogies that have defined their development. The publishing operation is part of a research program that aims to relate production, archives and critical reading of audiovisual practices.
The volume, designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio, was presented on June 4 at 6 p.m. at MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo in Rome and on June 18 at 6 p.m. at Museo del Novecento in Milan. In Rome, after the introductory greetings by Alessandro Rabottini, curators Carla Subrizi, Paola Ugolini and Maria Alicata dialogued with Cecilia Canziani around the contents of the volume. In Milan, the meeting will be introduced by Iolanda Ratti and will be attended by Carla Subrizi, Paola Ugolini and Michela Alessandrini.
“I welcomed this project with particular enthusiasm, both for the rigor of the research that supports it and for the urgency of the investigation it proposes,” says Beatrice Bulgari, president of Fondazione In Between Art Film. “The volume restores historical attention and critical depth to a constellation of women artists and filmmakers who have played a fundamental role in the development of moving images in Italy, without yet being fully recognized within that history. To support work like this is to contribute to a broader and more articulate rereading of the visual culture of the second half of the 20th century, bringing back to the center experiences and voices that have profoundly transformed the language of images.”
“Fondazione In Between Art Film has been committed for years to the dissemination of moving image culture the production of new works, exhibitions and publications. Supporting a research project like this means extending this commitment to the terrain of critical and historical reflection, encouraging a more complex reading of the genealogies that have shaped the relationship between art, cinema and video,” says Alessandro Rabottini, artistic director of Fondazione In Between Art Film. “The volume is dedicated to some pioneering figures who have used these media as spaces for experimentation and at the same time as tools for witnessing and intervening in the world. For the Foundation, this publication is a way to contribute to the construction and transmission of a broader, plural and conscious history of moving images. This publication continues our research work that, while focusing on moving images that tell the story of our present, also needs constant confrontation with the past and the history of temporal media.”
“This volume is the result of a long work of research, listening and traversing public and private archives, which are often fragmentary or little explored,” say curators Carla Subrizi, Paola Ugolini and Maria Alicata. “In the course of the project, unpublished materials, dispersed documents, correspondences, photographs, films and works have emerged that have made it possible to reconstruct a constellation of artistic and cinematic experiences that have long remained on the margins of the best-known narrative. More than a simple historical reconnaissance, the book aims to be a critical mapping of practices, relations and languages that spanned two crucial decades of Italian history.”
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| Women's cinema in the 1960s and 1970s: a volume on Italian women directors |
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