Tomaso Binga. IO SONO UNA CARTA…
a poetic… action, reading, performance
curated by: Cristiana Perrella and Andrea Viliani
9 December 2022 – 8 PM
As part of the exhibition Re-Materialization of Language 1978-2022 on 9 December 2022 at 8 PM, the Antonio Dalle Nogare Foundation presents Tomaso Binga. IO SONO UNA CARTA… a poetic… action, reading, performance, introduced by curators Cristiana Perrella and Andrea Viliani. A guided tour of the exhibition by the curators will take place at 7 PM.
The event marks the beginning of the Fondazione’s Live public programme activating the exhibition, and being repeated regularly. Named after one of the artist’s own compositions (Io sono una carta, 1977 – I am a paper, 1977), the event explores the Binga’s involvement in the show. It does so by connecting the exhibition to the artist’s oeuvre as a whole, and by activating its work through a public participatory enactment of its specific language through the mediation of the body and of gestures; beyond the written and visual dimensions. Reproposed on a regular basis, the exhibition turns into a living analysis of the ever-changing confine separating word and image, work and document, exhibition and book, artifact and body, author and spectator.
Deceitfully yet deliberately male, Tomaso Binga is the alter ego of Bianca Menna (Salerno, 1931). Through this caveat, the artist questions the art system as well as the means through which knowledge is produced and shared, starting from the basics of communication and the expression of the self: the word and language. Pivoted around writing as an artistic practice, Binga’s artistic and existential trajectory finds in the word, the gesture and the body an organic and radical outlet, which is at once intimate and shared.
After the early performances centred around gestures (Vista Zero, 1972) and writing (Nomenclatura e Ordine Alfabetico 1973- 1974), Binga transitioned to Poesia Muta, Ti scrivo solo di Domenica and Io Sono una Carta in 1977. The latter two were poetic performances devoted to the specific sound of words with a distinctive feminist voice, denouncing the condition of women marginalised by patriarchal and chauvinist male society. Binga recovers the rhythmic and timbral characteristics of the word to thicken the density and character of the poetic verse so as to let signified and signifier intertwine in a continuum of intimations, overlappings and mutual contaminations that reinvent and reassess language as a whole.
The destabilising elements of Binga’s performative poetry include: desecrating irony, the use of nonsense, the overturning of the common place, the overlap of written and visual poetry (that is composed of both word and image) and performed poetry. The energy of gestures and the dynamism of the body establish a direct connection between the text and its reader; the latter being called to actively respond to the unusual irony of the provocation that Binga throws out in the open, both linguistically and intellectually. “My body is also the body of the word”, declares the artist, after all. As Stefania Zuliani underlined, Binga’s is “total poetry that escapes obligations linked to genre with unreliquishing joy and has as its only desire that of belonging to the world. To this end, it builds its own flexible alphabet made of signs and sound gestures, of accents and irreverent inventions. And it does so by leveraging on the body, on the very female body that unequivocally turns, beyond conventions and all social obligation, into a letter and a symbol.”
Click here to download the press kit.
With the support of Autonomous Province South Tyrol and Gasperotti Safety & Comfort Doors.
In collaboration Frittelli | Arte Contemporanea, Galleria Tiziana Di Caro and Galleria Erica Ravenna.
