Suzanne Santoro

With the emergence of feminist movements in the 1960s, the body becomes the privileged means of expression for artists. Riding this wave of self-awareness also from a physical point of view, in 1974 Suzanne Santoro published the artist’s libretto Per una espressione nuova / Towards a New Expression, whose cover still bears the name of 'Rivolta Femminile' in the first edition of that year.

This bilingual publication dialogues in particular with Lonzi’s essay La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale, as it focuses on the sexual autonomy of women and the representation of the female sex

However, Carla Lonzi didn’t like the publication, refusing to recognize it as an independent form of expression from male culture. The lot of this libretto in the story of Rivolta Femminile shows to what extent the idea of a feminist artistic expression was incompatible with Carla Lonzi’s detachment from the world of art.

In this work, Santoro makes a study on the statues of the Roman era, to which she links the anatomical details of the female sex, observed and studied closely. The starting point of Santoro’s work is the removal of the female sex in the Western visual tradition.

The book, which was censored by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1977, is the essential point of the artist’s research, which explores these themes and creates parts of female bodies using resin and drawing as media.

The break with Lonzi is incurable, and Santoro leaves 'Rivolta Femminile'. Two years later, in 1976, she founded 'Cooperativa del Beato Angelico' in Rome, an art space for female artists, along with other artists who had abandoned Rivolta Femminile.

Paola Ugolini