Through women's eyes according to FAM

“On ne naît pas femme: on le devient“
Simone de Beauvoir

“Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life” (John Berger) and “there can be no true knowledge without the interweaving of other knowledge” (Maria Nadotti), and the ordinary or extraordinary use that can be made of it.
Through women’s eyes weaves, blends, hybridizes, and brings together various elements like perspectives, existences, emotions, and alterations through two constants: the authors are all women and the “medium” is always photography. These are the ingredients.
In The Second Sex, written in 1949 by Simone de Beauvoir, the author states that one is not born but, rather, becomes a woman, precisely because of the pressures from the social context which define women as “other” with respect to the male subject. Through a discussion that addresses biology, history, and culture, Simone de Beauvoir argues for the possibility for women to avoid this subordination, to free themselves from what should not be considered an inevitable fate, to establish themselves as individuals capable of going beyond their assigned condition. Many years have passed since Simone de Beauvoir asserted these ideas, and many times the horizons have shifted and the tensions have changed; body and gender were the privileged vehicles that introduced the new century, and anatomy has ceased to be synonymous with destiny.

For Donna Haraway, author of A Cyborg Manifesto: Women, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century(1995), metaphors are one of the central elements of this mutation, insofar as they foster mixing and contamination, associations between concepts and heterogeneous elements, bringing into question the concept of purity in terms of race, origin, and nature: we are all chimeras, all cyborgs, posits Haraway. She writes that, through our gaze, we establish ourselves in relation to the world, a gaze that becomes an active entity. The “manifest destiny” of humans is therefore to fulfill the function of consciousness that makes us active subjects, which is the essence of human identity, the quality that keeps us from confusing ourselves with the otherness of animals and machines. And this, perhaps, is the underlying theme of our journey. All the artists are active subjects, all have chosen to “be in the world,” searching, revisiting and watching that which constantly changes in the world: a true journey of visions, horizons, perspectives.
They chose photography as a territory of identity, symbolism, eroticism, politics, and poetics, not to represent and investigate their own personal stories, but to give voice to some of the most powerful tensions of contemporary life: identity, relationships, violence, difference. What we see, through more than two hundred works on display, is a triumphant body, sometimes modified, diffused, tragic... sometimes political, sometimes social. There is a delicate form of seeing that identifies so closely with the subject as to transform into narrative. As such, this exhibition is a survey of relationships, of human relations, between people and images of people. Photography, writes Berger, was born alongside industrial capitalism, but it was only in the twentieth century that it became the most “natural” and common way to deal with images, almost like substituting the world as its direct testimony, and each of these works becomes the possibility of an encounter from which to extract something general, a theory, a vision. All the works try to establish comparisons, to measure distances, to identify fractures, to witness the real experience of people and places, documenting the coexistence of cosmopolitanism and attachment to one’s roots. A contrast is imposed between frontal, direct, cutting works and a passionate, tragic, “romantic” vision. This is what unites all the artists.
Through women’s eyesis a manifesto on maintaining relationships, on relationships with the other, a view of the world from one’s own sense of responsibility. It is a project that emphasizes how photography has chosen in recent years to become a sort of conscience for the world, as well as a witness to that which is often concealed. Monozygotic twins, children cast as adults, sexual ambiguity, but also portraits of a poet and images of violent death, the beauty of epic adventures and a manifesto of a gender claim, new tribes, family conflicts and the legal instruments of the death penalty...
Through women’s eyesis a story told by many voices about the many forms of the body— physical, mythical, spiritual and glorious—with a double meaning: intimate and universal, in search of life, beyond the anonymous system of the mask. Each work becomes the provocation of an intimate and profound dialogue between the subjects of the photographs and the viewer, providing an indefinite glimpse of the shared human condition, a “call to awareness” of the existence of different worlds that are often foreign to each other.

Twenty-five stories, twenty-five unique perspectives on the world, on the other, on relationships, through approximately three hundred works by Diane Arbus, Martina Bacigalupo, Yael Bartana, Letizia Battaglia, Margaret Bourke-White, Sophie Calle, Lisetta Carmi, Tacita Dean, Lucinda Devlin , Donna Ferrato, Giorgia Fiorio, Nan Goldin, Roni Horn, Zanele Muholi, Shirin Neshat, Yoko Ono, Catherine Opie, Bettina Rheims, Tracey Rose, Martha Rosler, Chiara Samugheo, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Donata Wenders, and Yelena Yemchuk. All artists who address the deepest themes of human existence: life, death, love, the body, identity, shedding light on differences, conflicts, suffering, relationships, fears, mutations. But always going against the grain by choosing, all of them, to think of the work as something alive, something that unfolds in the dimension of real human relationships, in the dimension constrained by the physicality of the body and space: a work of interaction between people who are not trying to create a spectacular product, but a human experience, sometimes linked to physical pain, suffering, and death,but also to the ability to choose, to change, to become something else.

Freaks, monsters, prostitutes, animals, foreigners. Michel Foucault poses the question of the subject’s position in society: “[What are] the modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects [?].” The objectification of the subject, for Foucault, is split into two specific moments: the first concerns the methodologies and the structuring of the social dimension that are given the status of science, the case of the subject who works, a component in the broader analysis of wealth or of the economy, is a clear example. The second moment is identified with what Foucault calls “practices of division”: “The subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others. This process objectivizes him.” And here we find the categories of the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, and from the opposition of one compared to the other, the identity of the subject is defined, the figure of a “specific” subject, and therefore its placement. “Thus, it is not power but the subject that is the general theme of my research,” writes Foucault (Discipline and Punish, 1975). This mechanism demonstrates that the entire cultural apparatus exists in function of bodies, acting directly on and inside of them, manipulating them and constituting them as territories to be colonized, to influence and to construct. All the works on display seem to escape the rigidity of the main roads, managing to intrude into reality without subtracting meaning from it, but adding beauty.

The suggestion of a way of looking that does not shock or upset, but that opens a scenario of unexpected and extremely vital beauty. And so the world we experience becomes the preferred locus in which to withdraw from one’s own individuality in order to revolutionize oneself and others through extraordinary gestures. On the one hand, society creates illusionistic appearances that offer a surrogate for experience, while, on the other, art provides an opening to concrete experience. It is exposed before a complex drama, full of references to various sources: sometimes what seems indispensable is the revival of the tradition of reportage, sometimes a poignant and melancholy poetics, other times the language of the moral outrage and compassion. The main feature is the absolute centrality of the dialogue with reality, a centrality that establishes a close link with the forms of the world, in the recovery of the materials of life. And therein lies the paradox, in that whoever approaches these works realizes that there is nothing spontaneous about the world they narrate and describe. Whether portraying men or women, a room or a bed, a bench or an electric chair, the means of composing the work is never mere reportage, never a snapshot. One sees instead the ability to invent and construct stories from a poetic thought, from an idea of what might happen and often does.
The subjects portrayed by these photographers seem to express an awareness of the precariousness of their existence, bodies of both physical and psychological abandonment, shaken by inconsequential events that nevertheless marginalize them and threaten their survival. Epidermal surfaces covered in tattoos, surgical scars, bleached hair, the ravages of depression that define gazes, bodies that perceive their own fragility, a cycle of underground lives which no one asks about, in which nothing important seems to happen. Photographs, therefore, that document the kidnapping of a confused state in the subterranean human flow. Everything seems to register in fragments, an entire world contained in a still image, in which the flash acts as a disturbing presence, like a blinding light that seems to want to erase subject and scene, that seems to want to expand throughout the image until it dissolves, until it becomes a social, sexual and generational overexposure.

Many are the “issues” brought to light, a belabored and strongly marked path that signals a presence, that of the female gaze, attentive and penetrating, in which there is a clear desire to push past boundaries. Many are the contexts in which these artists move, but the constant in each image is perfectionism, which is to say clarity of ideas and execution. Indeed, in these works we think we see one thing and instead we are looking at another. The best possible response to Baudelaire, who believed he could condemn the photographers as mere engineers who do not invent anything. Here, within the realm of radical fiction, we measure how much reality there is in the “as if.”
Breaking free from the chains of prejudice, the artists have chosen to “watch” life, and the result is a kaleidoscope of powerful and evocative images, but also a catalog of feelings, instincts and cruelty, and a reflection on the nature of love. Each of the works contain something from each ofthe others: a doubling, a reflection, a quote, an exchange of glances. Through women’s eyesis intended as a challenge and a form of narrative that unfolds, like the weave of a tapestry, the intrinsic elements of human existence: the transformation of the body, blinding passion, deceit, violence, but also courage, challenge, the epic undertaking, romanticagony and social conscience, a balance of worlds suspended over the abyss. Often, in many of theworks, loneliness appears to be an inevitable fate, and, in absolute silence, the intimate fragility ofrelationships becomes the pietas that allows us to accept life, even in all its cruelty.

Diane Arbus, Martina Bacigalupo, Yael Bartana, Letizia Battaglia, Margaret Bourke-White, Sophie Calle, Lisetta Carmi, Tacita Dean, Lucinda Devlin, Donna Ferrato, Giorgia Fiorio, Nan Goldin,Roni Horn, Zanele Muholi, Shirin Neshat, Yoko Ono, Catherine Opie, Bettina Rheims, Tracey Rose,Martha Rosler, Chiara Samugheo, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Donata Wenders, Yelena Yemchuk: all of them, and each in an absolutely singular way, have chosen to focuson the world, on relationships, on the tensions and “encounters” between disparate situations.
All of them seem to want to remind us of the difference between the work and the image, and that there are images that are still taboo, images that reveal contradictions and unresolvedproblems, dirty images, free images, direct images.
By changing the point of view, a sort of emotional orientation is created in the attempt to “feel” the movement of the subjects and places “portrayed,” the limits, the gray areas, the repressed memories, the transient energies, the oscillations and dislocations. The attempt is to make this“dislocation” a new opportunity to cross over, to look for continually mobile pivotal points thatallow the different possibilities of encounter to condense... In these crossings, the conditionsare created for a series of approaches”... encounters, embraces, sightings, comparisons, performances, exhibitions... A vision at times a bit dirty, spurious, alien, reformulating a space that has been torn, dissolved, crumbled, exploded, which seeks the oscillation of loss.

Twenty-five encounters, a representation of crossing, encounter, randomness, and abandonment to the flow. This is how, almost spontaneously, the bearing structure of the project
was constructed, as a journey, a wandering, depending on the wind, a path that follows those
imperceptible shadows that shape the surface of the dunes up to the edges of the city, changing as the light changes. A desire, a path of pursuit, sometimes slow, sometimes silent, of that unreal appearance and disappearance of images that are reflected and, perhaps by their very nature, never really graspable, that have always characterized and haunted art, and artists. It is in the perpetuation of the play between light and dark of this poetic unreality that we see the works of Diane Arbus, Martina Bacigalupo, Yael Bartana, Letizia Battaglia, Margaret BourkeWhite, Sophie Calle, Lisetta Carmi, Tacita Dean, Lucinda Devlin, Donna Ferrato, Giorgia Fiorio,Nan Goldin, Roni Horn, Zanele Muholi, Shirin Neshat, Yoko Ono, Catherine Opie, Bettina Rheims,Tracey Rose, Martha Rosler, Chiara Samugheo, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Sam Taylor-Johnson,Donata Wenders, and Yelena Yemchuk… the bodies of the works as an insurgent appeal for life through art... And the work alludes, winks, ensnares, lures... in its mimesis with reality... in themost compelling love stories: art and life… as simple as an encounter.Each of the works tends to break the mold of gender through the assembly of heterogeneous
materials: narrative, lyrical digression, proclamations of peace, manifestos, portraits, murders,siblings... The main character is identity and its relationship with the sites it frequents daily, likerooms, shoeshine shops, or deserted beaches, but also a place of hybridization in which the division between public and private, internal and external, planning andspontaneity is less apparent, where existence and relationships intersect and mutually reformulate, and the casual,wandering gaze now perceives that space as a room, now as landscape, in a continuous escapefrom the prison of unambiguous perception.

There emerge from each of the works a gaze that wants to be free from all metaphysics, attentiveto capturing the essence of each object within the object itself, in its special contingency. Lifeand death of tiny beings that collide and clash, quiet perversions and reassuring faces, bizarrejuxtapositions and then flashes, luminous shocks between deeply rooted and immutable habits, interrupted and stripped naked by alienating images of disorientation and dizziness. Encounters capable of breaking the rational codes and morphologies within which human experiences, already atrophied, are deposited. Loss, the sense of the exhaustion of reason, the mixing and overcoming of a boundary that both distances us and brings us closer. The suspicion is that the subject of the experience is an outlying being that changes with the changing world, in a shiver that runs through all things. The structure of the path is polymorphous, like a soft maze, a set of uncontrolled signs with which to play with the production of possible and somehow always elusive meanings, a little farther away than any formulation of what we have always thought. It means living everywhere, being everywhere, wandering places already traveled within oneself by a multiplicity of limitations, a way of feeling at home everywhere, in the absence of the place of origin. Art, like life, is nomadic, and in a state of constant amazement... A collection of gazes full of unforeseen and variable landslides that generate a state of apprehension, in the double sense of “to fear” and “to apprehend,” to understand. Losing oneself is the initial condition in which every founder of every settlement findsherself before drawing its boundaries. The process from losing oneself to finding one’s bearings is the condition of adaptation that defines every story, whether personal or collective, but estrangement is the only means for reformulating space and perceiving its hidden energies.

Diane Arbus, Martina Bacigalupo, Yael Bartana, Letizia Battaglia, Margaret Bourke-White, Sophie Calle, Lisetta Carmi, Tacita Dean, Lucinda Devlin, Donna Ferrato, Giorgia Fiorio, Nan Goldin, Roni Horn, Zanele Muholi, Shirin Neshat, Yoko Ono, Catherine Opie, Bettina Rheims, Tracey Rose, Martha Rosler, Chiara Samugheo, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Donata Wenders, Yelena Yemchuk: the question for all of them is the problem of the relationship between image and representation, a question that seems to converge on the very ‘meaning” of the notion of the image in the very epoch where the world is effectively an image. In a certain sense, one might hypothesize a zone where the image is obscured from itself, where the impact of the image, its power, its magnetic force are materialized in an exhibition that hides an otherness, a difference. This otherness perhaps constitutes the curve of aesthetic appearance: exhibiting in the sensation, the presence, the materiality (the chemistry of the photograph, as Roland Barthes writes) the “meaning” without showing the origin. Indeed the image does not represent reality precisely because, in the end, it somehow produces torsos and fragments… In a passage from Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, his last book, Roland Barthes suggested that the essence of the photographic image (or what he preferred to call its noema) lay in its documentary power—i.e. its capacity to fix that temporal dimension of the past: the photographic image would thus be more akin to “magic” than to any sort of analogon of reality. It would thus constitute a sort of emanation of what happened, a re-emergence of a previous time, a visible artifact: the sign of that which was certainly there. The photographer, therefore, becomes a kind of witness: “The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object, but on time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation” (R. Barthes, Camera Lucida, Hill and Wang, 1981). The photograph seems to belong to the promise of a “reemergence” of a previous time, and its influence on us is that which Barthes effectively identifiesas the punctum: “sting, speck cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me” seems far from any sort of vivification of our individualexperience. Elsewhere he continues, “The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed.”

The complex relationship between the fullness, the immanence, the stability of the image and its implicit background, the vanishing point between the total and perfect appearance and its hidden violence, is also at the core of a reflection by Jean-Luc Nancy, especially in his essay “Forbidden Representation.” The object of Nancy’s enquiry here is precisely the relationship between image and violence, between form and violation: is it possible to represent and communicate the unrepresentable, that which naturally evades mimesis, which is to say absolute violence—such as the holocaust? On this premise he builds a philosophical perspective by providing a reconstruction on the conceptual history of the aesthetic image (Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, Fordham University Press, 2005).
Diane Arbus, Martina Bacigalupo, Yael Bartana, Letizia Battaglia, Margaret Bourke-White, Sophie Calle, Lisetta Carmi, Tacita Dean, Lucinda Devlin, Donna Ferrato, Giorgia Fiorio, Nan Goldin, Roni Horn, Zanele Muholi, Shirin Neshat, Yoko Ono, Catherine Opie, Bettina Rheims, Tracey Rose, Martha Rosler, Chiara Samugheo, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Donata Wenders, Yelena Yemchuk: for all of them the question is what we see and the way we see it, our points of view, the qualities and limits of our vision. In the course of life, experience changes both what we see and the way we see. We know that time changes things, it’s inevitable, all the works on display have multiple modes of narration, of exposition, of indication, and in work after work there is the simplicity of the gesture: the Other. Gesture, ritual, sensation, emotion, fractures, languages… a feeling that becomes a lost feeling, at the mercy of an image of beauty and love in the fragments of a horizon that tends to blur the image, replace it, falsify it, lead it elsewhere, in the only “point of contact” between work of art and viewer. This is a journey into the complexity and the vision of twenty-five key figures of contemporary art and thought.

A study that focuses attention on the intersections between art, photography and identity, with the scientific and social tensions of the time, an itinerary aimed at privileging the breaking of boundaries, coloring outside the lines, through works of art by some of the most significant figures in the creation of a new mentality that extends beyond art. A mentality that creates loci, visions, directions, intersections: a dimension of the most living and vibrant art, that which, through these women, has taken on a revolutionized conception of itself.

Francesca Alfano Miglietti