The presentation, introduced by the curators and authors of the publication, Cristiana Perrella and Andrea Viliani, will be accompanied by a performance by Gaia Ginevra Giorgi, an artist and researcher active in the field of performing arts.

Giorgi's practice integrates writing, sound, voice, and performative devices. From a feminist, ecological, and situated approach, the artist develops investigative practices and methodologies for an affective and political rewriting of archives and landscapes, understood as territories of manipulation and expressions of power, but also as possible tools for counter-narratives. Her interventions (performances, installations, and text-based projects) create ephemeral habitats—spaces of embodied and radical imagination.

Re-Materialization of Language. 1978–2022 represents the first attempt at a philological reconstruction of the seminal exhibition Materializzazione del linguaggio, while simultaneously re-activating and re-contextualizing its historical themes in the present. Long overlooked, the 1978 exhibition, curated by Mirella Bentivoglio and dedicated to the verbo-visual explorations of eighty international women artists across diverse materials and practices, both individual and collective, marked a belated reintegration of women’s and feminist art practices within an edition of the Biennale di Venezia that was not yet fully aware of their significance. Now recognized, after a long period of oblivion, as a turning point in the institutional emergence of women’s creativity and feminist art, Materializzazione del linguaggio was re-presented as a new exhibition in 2022, on the centenary of Bentivoglio’s birth, at Antonio Dalle Nogare Foundation in Bolzano, and is now re-materialized in this publication.

Featuring visual and textual contributions from curators and editors Cristiana Perrella, Andrea Viliani, and Vittoria Pavesi; artists Tomaso Binga, Monica Bonvicini, BRACHA, and Nora Turato, who were invited to re-activate the exhibition; exhibition designer Matilde Cassani; book graphic designer Irma Boom; and Studio Mut, the graphic designers of the exhibition's communication materials, this publication, like the exhibition itself, navigates between bi- and tri-dimensionality, blurring the distinction between artwork and document, between museum and archive.

Re-Materialization of Language. 1978–2022 is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (2023).