In Soresina the exhibition Prima Guardia by Franca Pisani with 100 works from the period 1972-1977

Opening on Sunday, December 5, at 5 p.m. at the DAV (Department of Visual Arts) in Soresina, in the province of Cremona, will be First Guard, Franca Pisani’s exhibition open until January 9, 2022, curated by Francesco Mutti. After explorations of the archetypes of the “sign,” after reviving ancient artifacts and paying homage to the feminine universe, the Tuscan artist recounts her own past. And she does so by giving life to an art-historical and didactic project that stems from the desire to recover to the collective memory and to the history of art in general a period in the artist’s life that was particularly fertile with innovations and experimentation, collaborations, encounters and ties that took place in the midst of the 1970s, so full of great ferment when the artist was in her twenties. In all, about a hundred original works made between 1972 and 1977 will be on view at the DAV in Soresina: sketches, drawings, photos, irons, cartoons, to which will be added 13 original plates for producing stamps and their related stamps; in addition, videos of performances written by Franca Pisani will be screened: there will be four, all interpreted by actresses Giulia File and Alessia Mori.

In the new space in the Cremona province dedicated to contemporary art, curator Mutti will try to recount the events, friendships, thoughts, and excerpts from the lived life of an artist who had all the makings of turning her world upside down, but who was swept away by events far greater than herself.What Mutti and Pisani are working on together is an art-historical and didactic project that originates from the desire to recover to the collective memory and to art history in general a period of the Artist’s life that was particularly fertile with innovations and experimentation, collaborations, encounters and ties of which there is no trace in the history books and in the timeline because of some very serious political events that took place in the midst of those years of great turmoil in the 1970s to which, the very artist in her early twenties, was unfortunately unjustly accosted.Despite everything, Franca Pisani pursued her dreams by giving life to fundamental exhibition programs (in spaces in Milan and Florence) and corporations, especially by conceiving and developing Album Operozio of 1976 and Manumissio, manifesto of the new “conceptual art” of 1977, two projects that will be seen in the exhibition. Both represent the summa of the sharing ideal of those years, both ideologically and practically, and include outstanding names, including Eugenio Miccini, Ketty la Rocca, Enrico Crispolti, Paolo Masi, Maurizio Nannucci, Giulio Paolini, Rebecca Horn, Hervé Fischer and many others. The two publishing projects make clear, today as in the past, what respect and trust the very young and talented artist enjoyed in contemporary art circles.

“We girls picked up the discontent of our mothers,” the artist recalls, “and agreed on radical action for women artists. Culture, and particularly art, was the weapon of revenge; Feminism the bread and salt of culture itself. We dreamed of trips to the studios-studios of our colleagues, we planned exhibitions, works, and the ferment was continuous thanks to the unstoppable overlapping and confrontation of ideas of stories and hopes. We dreamed that the world would change for the better through art and that art would be the essential tool for the new renaissance. But despite our common wishes, as women we could not have our rightful place in the world unless represented by the usual merchants. We did not see art as a commercial good, but we dreamed like many of our colleagues that art was a universal heritage, that it belonged to everyone. Today, women are not yet where they belong, but slowly and hard, screaming and shouting they are slowly making it. I am proud to see them in the great Museums, not only as guides, but on the walls of the most important rooms, starting with those who have gone before us: from Artemisia Gentileschi, to Tintoretta, all the way to Kusama, to Louise Bourgeois, to Accardi. All of them are close to my heart. The verbal dimension has been a feature of my work since the 1970s, when in the midst of conceptual research, I was among the very few visual workers to measure themselves against the relationship between space, image, word, sign and meaning.”

What is the significance of First Guard by Tuscan artist Franca Pisani?“On the one hand,” the curator explains, “it is the rededication to History (of Art, at least) of the memory of something that, perhaps in spite of itself, it had to abandon, throwing it away in haste without reflecting on the consequences and without a valid reason for doing so - but, rather, at the mercy of events from which it was impossible to escape; on the other - and more than anything else - it is the restoration of dignity to the work of an artist who, due to strange and intricate plots of fate, was forced to sever her daily life sharply in the name of a violently imposed self-preservation, of a spirit devoted to survival that had to sacrifice everything, first and foremost an intense, passionate, stimulating, rich path of growth, choices and ideas that was in all respects in step with the times if not, in some cases, even well in advance. FIRST GUARD is, as a result, a historical project in the true sense of the expression and didactic at the same time, marked by some extraordinary corporate ideas that, between 1975 and 1978, gave birth to a series of shared artistic experiences of absolute scope: Album Operozio and Manumissio in fact represent the last stages of a series of contacts, relationships, travels, acquaintances, friendships, discussions, opportunities, confirmations and renunciations that represent the essence of Franca’s life in those years and that, all of a sudden, are silenced as if they never existed. This is proven by the fact that the fundamental documentation that is presented in this catalog and in the exhibition has never been recalled in art history books over the years nor is it even mistakenly mentioned; and it is missing altogether from the memory and collections of contemporary dealers and enthusiasts.”

In Soresina the exhibition Prima Guardia by Franca Pisani with 100 works from the period 1972-1977

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