The British School at Rome is delighted to present the first solo exhibition in Italy by Eloise Fornieles, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow.
The exhibition opens on 5 November at 6 PM and runs until 19 December, with visiting hours Monday to Friday, from 3 to 7 PM.
The title of Eloise Fornieles’ first solo exhibition in Rome derives from Carla Lonzi’s celebrated 1978 assertion: “Shut up, or rather speak” (Taci, anzi parla).
Like Fornieles’ own practice, the phrase performs authority in order to subvert it. Bringing together sculpture, sound, installation, and painting, Anzi Parla extends this project to complicate the relationship between the speaking and listening; between power and protest; between visibility and privacy. In doing so the exhibition reflects on what it means in the present historical moment to be seen and to be heard: to be represented.
Drawing on Fornieles’ post-doctoral research into the function of voice in acts of protest, the exhibition likewise threads together the histories of the Rivolta Femminile (the feminist collective co-founded by Lonzi, Carla Accardi, and Elvira Banotti); of the “talking statues” of Rome (used by citizens to broadcast anonymous expressions of dissent); and of Roman graffiti from the classical era to the present day. These diverse forms of public expression model different means—collective authorship, abstraction, and ventriloquism—by which the nonconforming and therefore vulnerable subject might protect their anonymity and separate the voice from the body.
Fornieles’ palimpsest-paintings evoke the layers of dissent expressed through the “talking statues,” to which Romans have, since the sixteenth century, attached satirical notes protesting the power of church and state. In each case a complex, layered scrawl obscures—or effaces—buried images of each of the six “talking statues.” These gestures imply the movement of a body in the act of writing, breaking down a script in order to forge a new and differently coded alphabet. Over these loose, repetitive, and associative characters are collaged symbols evoking the non-binary language—which does not assign gender to nouns—which has been banned by the incumbent Italian government from schools.
An installation of six video monitors on plinths reimagines the “talking statues” as avatars through which the anonymous voices of activists, journalists, lawyers, and educators are broadcast. Their accounts of resistance score videos of protesters pixelated to protect their identity, contemporary examples of graffiti, and abstracted colour fields. On the surrounding walls are charcoal drawings based on archival examples of ancient graffiti found in Rome and Pompeii, to which the audience is invited to add their own drawings and texts. This layered, polyphonic experience connects present expressions of dissent to long histories of protest and resistance.
Fornieles’ research is supported by The British School at Rome and The British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Public Programme
Workshop di giustizia trasformativa e scrittura creativa
🗓 9 November, 3–7 PM
📍Antigone Library in Via degli Ausoni 45, Rome, in collaboration with the independent project bar.lina
🗣 In Italian
Facilitated by writer and activist Giusi Palomba
More info coming soon.
Transformative Justice Creative Writing Workshop
🗓 12 November, 3–7 PM
📍 The British School at Rome
🗣 In English
Facilitated by writer and activist Giusi Palomba
More info coming soon.
ASTERISK
🗓 26 November, 6:30 PM
📍 The British School at Rome
Performance with: Jahān Khājavi, Eloise Fornieles, and Nathalie di Sciascio
More info coming soon.
