Tomaso Binga: Euforia

On April 17, the Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee – museo Madre will hold the opening of the exhibition Euforia Tomaso Binga, curated by Eva Fabbris with Daria Khan, exhibition design Rio Grande: it will be the artist’s largest ever museum retrospective, featuring the forty years of her artistic practice through more than one hundred and twenty works, including visual poems, installations, photographs, collages, documents, and performance testimonies—many of them on show here for the first time or decades after their first display—on loan from museums and private collections.

Euforia [Euphoria]—a word particularly dear to Binga by virtue of it containing all the vowels, and thus being phonetically universal and extrovert—becomes “a title-cum-manifesto,” Fabbris explains, “a wish, a political call to resistance,” connoting her approach to verbo-visual practices as much as to feminism.

Tomaso Binga (Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, born in Salerno in 1931, lives and works in Rome), is an artist who in 1971 chose to enter the art world under a male pseudonym in order to highlight male privilege even in the field of culture: “My male name,” says Binga, “plays on irony and displacement; it aims to expose the male privilege that reigns in the art field, and as such it is a paradoxical contestation of a superstructure that we have inherited and which, as women, we wish to dismantle. In art, gender, age, and nationality should not be discriminating factors. The artist is neither a man nor a woman but a PERSON.”

Throughout her forty-year career, she has spoken of the female body as a signifier of freedom through her original visual poetry and performances, playing with words to affirm a joyful form of feminism, characterized by acts of desecration, humor, and denunciation.

After major experiments with de-semanticized writing (illegible handwritten signs that disintegrate and eliminate language), from 1975 onwards, her Scrittura vivente [Living Writing] project developed into a series of works in which her photographed body would take the form of the letters of the alphabet. Naked and devoid of any social connotation, the artist becomes a linguistic symbol, “the body of the word” taking responsibility for its own messages. Binga herself becomes an alphabet, using herself as a linguistic tool with which to stimulate new processes of learning and understanding. Written in this corporeal alphabet, letters, pronouns, and words are thus reinvented, questioning one another so as to investigate the body and the grammatical and symbolic hierarchies to which it is subjected.

The exhibition presents the upshot of two years of research, carried out in close collaboration with the artist and her archive, and is thematically arranged throughout the eighteen rooms of the museum’s third floor, featuring an experimental layout with a circular path conceived by the multidisciplinary collective Rio Grande in dialogue with Tomaso Binga herself. The display structure is conceived with affinities of a graphic and visual nature as well as ones of content, continuity, flexibility, and playfulness.

For the museo Madre, organizing the first major retrospective on Tomaso Binga means reaffirming the relevance of the themes and methods with which this artist questioned pressing identitary and social issues for decades through her linguistic inventiveness. The ability to adapt language to the necessary sensitivity and gender issues continues to be necessary to this day.

The book accompanying the exhibition, published by Lenz Press in Italian and English, is edited by Eva Fabbris, Lilou Vidal, and Stefania Zuliani. It is split into three parts: the first features essays and an interview with the artist; the second offers a series of short critical texts analyzing single works or small bodies of work from the artist’s key areas of interest; while the third is devoted to her visual poetry.

The publication was supported by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture as part of the Italian Council (2023) program, with the support of the Amici del Madre Association.