Shut Up…

Taci, anzi parla (be quiet, or rather speak) is the name of the open call that the National Gallery launched between April and May 2020, when for the first time, in the interest of collective health, we learned to accept forced distancing, secluded to a strictly private and domestic dimension.

The name of the call is highly symbolic and alone can suggest its reasons, its goals and its deep connections with Carla Lonzi's diary bearing the same name and with the large group exhibition Io dico io (I say so), scheduled for February 2021

These titles could help us understand how some of the cores of gender issues - and in the specific case feminist ones - can be regarded in their manifestation in the form of language, that is, through the constant dialectic between expression and non-expression, between bringing out and keeping within, between speaking and keeping silent.

The term ‘be silent’ describes a condition of silence: the absence of expression that has historically characterised the point of view of minorities and especially of women. For them, in fact, self expression - as individuals and as a group - giving oneself an authentic voice, was not a free possibility but rather a necessity sought through the most diverse struggles, giving rise to the conflict between authenticity and culture of which Lonzi's text bears witness.

Today we become aware of this condition of forced silence when we discover that, in every field, the works of female minds are always fewer than those of men, or even when we realize that most portraits of women rarely fall within self-representation. Instead, they are much more often the product of a monodic and external narrative which founded its status as dogma precisely on silencing the collective and the different.

In our daily life, everything suggests an extreme ease of expression and a good distance from possible exclusion. Incredibly, however, the ongoing health emergency has provided us with a - albeit pale - representation of it, granting us the opportunity to identify, for once, with the condition of isolation that has marked the history of female expression.