Florence, at the Museo del Novecento the great Valie Export guest for the day against violence against women

For the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, which is celebrated every year on Nov. 25, the Museo del Novecento in Florence had a special guest, the great Austrian artist Valie Export (Waltraud Lehner; Linz, 1940), the leading female exponent ofViennese Actionism, who inspired an artist such as Marina Abramović, and who took on her stage name in the feminist view of renouncing her father’s surname. Valie Export, whose work has always focused on the themes of feminism, commodification of the body and gender identity, was present at the day when the museum’s artistic director, Sergio Risaliti, presented to the public the We Stand TogetHER program schedule, a series of projects involving contemporary women artists on the theme of violence against women. In fact, the program aims to broaden and deepen reflection on the topic, emphasizing the importance of social, political and cultural engagement against all violence and sexual discrimination.

During the day, which began at the Sala d’Arme in Palazzo Vecchio (the We Stand TogetHER program is in fact produced in collaboration with the Department of Rights and Equal Opportunities and the Department of Culture of the City of Florence), the works of Valie Export were screened and a held a talk on issues related to the body, identity and gender that involved curator Paola Ugolini and artist Silvia Giambrone (Agrigento, 1981), the latter winner last March of the eighth edition of the VAF prize, one of the most prestigious European awards for young artists. Two works by Silvlia Giambrone are now on display, until January 9, 2020, in the halls of the permanent collection of the Museo del Novecento: they are works that deal with the themes of domestication to violence, using different means of expression such as video, drawing, collage, sculpture, photography and performance. Finally, the day ended with the installation, in the Cortile di Michelozzo in Palazzo Vecchio, of the work The Most Dangerous Place by Silvia Levenson and Natalia Saurin, composed of 94 ceramic plates decorated with phrases extrapolated from the media and used to minimize news episodes related to violence (94 is the number of women killed so far in Italy in 2019).

“A symbolic day such as today’s that, thanks to art, comes to life bringing us to reflect on a theme that is still so dramatically current,” comments Sara Funaro, councillor for rights and equal opportunities of the Municipality of Florence. “The violence suffered by women outside and inside the walls of the home is a scourge of our society and the numbers prove it. Three women killed every week in Italy, with 142 victims during 2018, an enormity. This is why, as a municipality, we support awareness-raising initiatives like this, as well as supporting various city associations to help women who suffer violence.”

“On the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women,” says Culture Councillor Tommaso Sacchi, “Florence takes a strong and clear position, and it does so by expressing itself in the language that suits it best, the language of art. This is why Michelozzo’s courtyard hosted the installation by artists Levenson and Saurin: 94 ceramic plates, as many as the number of women killed in Italy in 2019 alone, decorated with the phrases that hurt the most, those used by the media to belittle or ”normalize“ violence against women, an intolerable violence that normal cannot and should not be. We are also particularly keen on the intervention in the adjacent Sala d’Arme and Museo Novecento by Valie Export, an iconic artist whose unscrupulous, irreverent and timeless images point the finger at our gender stereotypes and invite us, once again, to reflect on this serious epidemic that knows no crisis in Italy.”

“In recent years,” explains Sergio Risaliti, “we have decided to occupy the symbolic space of collective events, returning to art and artists a centrality of expression and denunciation so as to empty celebrations of too much useless rhetoric. The International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women must be perceived as a revolt against language, gestures, behaviors and actions that humiliate, marginalize, subjugate and rape women and the feminine, but also against any action intended to offend otherness on the basis of gender or racial discrimination. We cannot remain silent in the face of what is a real civil war. In 2018, as many as 142 women were killed in our country, and in 2019, 94 have already died, not counting the women wounded not only in body but in soul, as there is violence that kills even with small gestures and words. It is an honor to have hosted Valie Export, a champion of feminism, activist and reference point for every successive generation in art. Her performances and actions have directly revealed the disproportion of male power perpetuated at all levels in culture and society, in families and among couples. However, we wanted to compare the artistic and performative language of her generation, which had to break down walls, with the practice and works of the current generation represented by artists Silvia Giambrone, Silvia Levenson and Natalia Saurin. In a society in which, as Foucault explained, the exercise of control and power is all the more pervasive the more invisible it is, male power continues to be acted upon and perpetuated in an often silent but continuous manner, except to explode violently to the point of leading to murder whenever it renounces equal confrontation with the opposite sex and does not tolerate its freedom and non-dependence.”

Pictured: Valie Export, Einkreisung (1976)

Florence, at the Museo del Novecento the great Valie Export guest for the day against violence against women

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