Magazzino Italian Art presented a four-part lecture series, Politics of Labor in Postwar Italian Art, curated by the 2021-2022 Magazzino Scholar-in-Residence, Katie Larson.
Silvia Bottinelli's lecture reflected on the practice of Italian artists that, from the 1960s to the 1990s, addressed domestic labor by reassembling images and objects. By rearranging materials available in the home space—from magazines to appliances—Ketty La Rocca, Lucia Marcucci, Milli Gandini, and Mirella Bentivoglio, among others, shifted the meanings of consumer products designed to achieve efficiency. As highlighted by theorist and activist Silvia Federici, 1970s feminists understood women’s unpaid domestic labor, along with racial exploitation, as one of the pillars on which capitalism proliferated. Thus, making art (not soup) became a form of opposition to the system—a “refusal to work,” as in the contemporaneous tactics of the Autonomia movement.
About Silvia Bottinelli
Silvia Bottinelli (PhD University of Pisa) is Senior Lecturer and Interim Chair of the Visual and Material Studies Department, School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She serves on the executive committee of the Tufts International Literary and Visual Studies program; and is a Tisch College Faculty Fellow for 2021/22. Silvia’s scholarship focuses on 20th and 21st-century Italian art and food-based art. Her book Double-Edged Comforts: Domestic Life in Modern Italian Art and Visual Culture (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021) was supported by grants of the Italian Art Society, the Center for Italian Modern Art, and the American Philosophical Society. She co-edited two volumes: Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art (with Sharon Hecker, Bloomsbury 2021); and The Taste of Art (with Margherita d’Ayala Valva, University of Arkansas Press, 2017). Her research has been widely published in edited volumes and scholarly journals including Art Journal, Modernism/modernity, Public Art Dialogue, Food Studies, Palinsesti, Predella, Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte, among others.
