FRIDA SANSTRÖM

The Swedish Institute in Rome Annual Fellowship, Art History

During my time of study at the Swedish Institute in Rome, I will engage with Italian art critic and feminist Carla Lonzi (1931–1982). In the middle of the ‘hot autumn’ of 1969-1970, Lonzi abandoned formalist art criticism for radical separatist feminism and co-founded the first Italian separatist and anti-authoritarian feminist group, Rivolta Femminile, in 1970. By meticulous studies in the Lonzi archive at the Galleria Nazionale, in the Pinot Gallizio Archive in Torino and in the Martha Lonzi Archive in Milan, I will investigate Lonzi’s early interest in the concept of the informal, and the way that this concept influenced her subsequent critique representation in art, and in society. An informal critique, I assert, is fundamentally social and a collective practice. I will therefor link the concept of the informal to the activities that Lonzi undertook within Rivolta Femminile during the years of 1970–1975, where she also coined the concept of deculturalization. I understand Lonzi’s deculturalization as a withdrawal from social, aesthetic, and sexual representation. To trace the development of this concept and practice, Lonzi’s early engagement with the informal must be revisited, along with the socio-political struggle regarding sexual liberation in focus for the foundation of Rivolta Femminile.