Italian poet, artist, and curator Mirella Bentivoglio’s graphic experiments employ Concrete and Visual Poetry to combine feminist and avant-garde discourses. She became a key figure in the international movements tied to verbal-visual experimentations, promoting the work of fellow female artists working with the same approach. Between 1971 and 1981 Bentivoglio curated fourteen exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including Materializzazione del linguaggio, held at the Magazzini del sale for the 38th International Art Exhibition. That exhibition – the first dedicated to women artists working with language as their chosen medium – presented the work of eighty Italian and international female artists. Storia del monumento (1968), a portfolio including six silkscreen works on paper, was realised in collaboration with artist Annalisa Alloatti. Across its pages the artists mutate the Italian word “monumento,” highlighting the linguistic fragments it contains: nume, meaning “godlike;” me non tu, or “me not you;” muto, meaning “I am mutating;” and temo, “I fear.” Bentivoglio and Alloatti dismantle the imposing significance of the monument as an abstract idea by extricating, sabotaging, and untethering language from predefined dialogical positions, rejecting standardised patriarchal discourse while also reclaiming and re-establishing their own subjectivities.
Liv Cuniberti
