On Friday 16 September 2022, at 6 p.m., the artworks by Tomaso Binga return to the Frittelli arte contemporanea gallery with the exhibition Tomaso Binga. Parole abitate [Inhabitated Words] curated by Raffaella Perna.

Tomaso Binga, poet and performer, born Bianca Pucciarelli Menna (Salerno 1931, lives and works in Rome), who uses the provocative pseudonym with the aim of laying bare male privilege even in the field of art, presents for the first time artworks from the recent series Alfabeto poetico monumentale [Monumental Poetic Alphabet], AlphaSymbol, ArteNatura [ArtNature], alongside a selection of works from the 1970s, including the polystyrene sculptures Piedi [Feet] (1973) and Congiunte separate [Joint separated] (1973), the photo-performance A me [To me] (1976-1977) or the alphabet Esse sono [They are] (1976).

The centrepiece of the exhibition is the Alfabeto poetico monumentale [Monumental Poetic Alphabet] (2019), which is closely related to the previous series of the Alfabetiere murale [Wall alphabetizer] (1976) that Tomaso Binga created in the Tuscan capital with the help of her friend, artist and photographer, Verita Monselles. To obtain the 26 images immortalising Tomaso Binga as her body was modelled into the shape of the letters of the alphabet took a great deal of work and for months the artist frequented Verita Monselles' Florentine studio where she tried and tried again every pose to achieve this work that today is among the best known of the feminist art season of the 1970s.

A dialogue between yesterday and today from which the themes dear to the artist emerge: the power of language, the expressiveness of the body, the identity of women, the role of individual and collective historical memory. A reflection that is translated into words and phrases made up of letters modelled with Tomaso Binga's body, reproduced at her natural height of 160 cm.

The grandeur of these new “sculpture-signs” contrasts with the fragility of the material chosen as a support, polystyrene, which Tomaso Binga has been using since 1971 for its dual value as a ductile substance and a technological element typical of the packaging produced by advanced capitalist societies. The artist redeems this waste material by moulding it according to a corporeity experienced and exhibited with irony to give space to “the imperfect, the error, the out-of-place”.

In this new alphabet, the artist creates a bridge between the different phases of her career, shedding light on the affinities between the Sculture viventi [Living Sculpture] and the early Polistirolo [Styrofoam]. This link is reaffirmed by the choice of exhibiting the Alfabeto monumentale [Monumental Alphabet] alongside the polystyrene sculptures Piedi [Feet] (1973) and Congiunte separate [Joint separated] (1973), where the centrality of the body is made explicit by the images of hands and feet that establish a dialogue made up only of gestures, framing human gestures within a more general phenomenon of the redemption of non-verbal communication.

The work Dattilocodice (1978) - now on display at the Venice Biennial - is instead at the origin of the new AlphaSymbol and the ArteNatura cycle, where letters and graphic signs compose optical-visual tables, closely reminiscent of the modular experiments of kinetic art and Optical Art, but which retain a close link with the linguistic universe to which they belong and explore the iconic character of writing, emphasizing the visual qualities of the word, which becomes first and foremost an image.

“... transformed into the alphabetical signs of a living writing, it is my body, 
naked because it lacks any social connotation. 
More than before, it is a silent writing, written directly with the body that, 
freeing itself from the tyranny of the sign, becomes a sign itself.”