Tomaso Binga, born Bianca Pucciarelli in Menna, artist and performer, is among the most renown exponents in Italy in the field of visual and verbal poetry.
“My masculine name is meant to be ironic and unexpected, intended to expose the male privilege dominating the art. world; it's a paradoxical challenge to the superstructure we've inherited, and which as women, we aim to destroy. In art, gender, age, nationality should not be discriminated against. The Artist is not a man or a woman but a person.
I work with writing, I don't want to invent a new code, but undertake a process of desemantisation of the verbal code and a new resemantisation. To define my work critics have talked of cryptic, hidden, submerged, in-scribed writing. I recognise myself in this definition, but I'd like to add that my writing is subliminal, meaning it acts (l'd like it to act) within us without distracting us from the current meaning of the words and without becoming bewildered by the sound of the words themselves; therefore, it may also be defined as silent writing. In my work, words grow and multiply like living beings, they stray from designated places, they proliferate like cells, invading the space around us.
The choice of different media responds to this proliferating need of the writing. The series of Lettere liberatorie (Liberating letters) and then Le carte da parato (The wallpapers) arise exactly from this need to disseminate the writing.”
A writing that becomes “living” to the extent that Binga employs her own body. Her body “shows itself as writing. Freeing itself from the tyranny of the symbol it becomes itself a symbol. It's an action-mark that attempts to confer a more global meaning to writing, a more concrete physicality and simultaneously, a polyvalence of meaning opposing any reductive specialisation.
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It's the reassessment of what is imperfect, incorrect, disordered, out of place. We don't want to feel like abstract entities anymore, but like people, physically, socially and politically human.”