Morbid: the sinuous feminine of Valeria Magli

“Morbid” is the word chosen by Valeria Magli to describe the opposing and contradictory forces that have defined womanhood over the centuries: a seductive, lovable, affectionate figure on the one hand, and an object of morbid, violent, and deadly desire on the other. An eccentric and innovative artist, in her work Magli explored the relationship between body, gesture, movement, and word, engaging in dialogue with exponents of the Neo-avant-garde and experimental poetry such as Arrigo Lora Totino and Nanni Balestrini, both represented in the Museion collection within the Archivio di Nuova Scrittura.

The in-depth essay by Caterina Molteni presented here was produced within the framework of the 13th edition of the Italian Council, in which Museion acted as cultural partner for Molteni’s research project. It adds an important element to the study of female figures and verbo-visual practices, which Museion has been pursuing for some time. At the same time, the concept of morbid connects with THE SOFTEST HARD, Museion’s thematic line for 2025, dedicated to forms of non-violent resistance and gentle radicalism.

There is one word chosen by Valeria Magli to describe the female figure: morbid, a term inherited from German, which in Italian, by assonance, also recalls “softness” and the “sinuous.” Morbid is a word that conveys a dichotomy, a coexistence of opposing forces that have defined women throughout the centuries: a seductive, lovable, affectionate figure on one side, an object of morbid, violent, and deadly desire on the other.

Morbid is the title of the exhibition Valeria Magli. MORBID, held at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna from January 29 to May 11, 2025, and also the interpretive key chosen to delve into the work of an eccentric and unique figure in the Italian artistic panorama.

Valeria Magli was born in Bologna in 1953. A lively yet deeply shy child, she was involved by her parents in a fervent creative activity that ranged from piano and classical dance lessons to competitive swimming and gymnastics. The artist describes as fundamental to her education the idea of a “physical culture” that developed in parallel with the artistic and intellectual one. During her university years—she graduated in Philosophy under Luciano Anceschi—she became involved with the feminist movement, an experience that worked as an “undercurrent,” not only interpreted but “re-created” in performances and danced actions. As she stated in 1978:
“[Feminist] ideology was useful to me in a precise moment and context to criticize existing models, but I do not intend to transfer it into performance, where content may pass with greater strength if filtered through a poetic form and mediated by spectacular conventions.”[1]

The late 1970s marked her encounter with figures connected to the Italian literary Neo-avant-garde and the world of experimental poetry. This was the period when collaborations with Arrigo Lora Totino and Nanni Balestrini began. With the former, a pioneer of phonetic poetry, she created Futura, a performance inspired by the declamatory mimes of the historical avant-gardes. With writer and poet Nanni Balestrini, Valeria Magli wove an intense artistic relationship.

Within what has been defined as “total poetry” – that set of formal and conceptual operations which, between the 1960s and 1970s, brought poetry out of the book page into the concrete-visual, sonic, and performative field – Valeria Magli worked on the relationship between body, gesture, movement, and word. This absolutely innovative practice was called by the artist poesia ballerina[2] (“dancing poetry”).

Among the works included in the first retrospective dedicated to the artist (significantly titled Poesia ballerina) at the Teatro di Porta Romana, the performance Banana morbid offers a privileged key to enter Magli’s formal and poetic universe.

Banana morbid

Created in 1980, Banana morbid[3] stages the tension between masculine and feminine, ironically evoked in the very title: “banana” recalls phallic rigidity, while “morbid,” with its dual meaning, embodies the contradictions of the female figure.

Recalling the genesis of her work, Valeria Magli said she was struck by the term morbid after conversations with an antiquarian friend, who had explained its use in relation to Jugendstil, the German variant of Art Nouveau.

In that context, morbid carried its original meaning: fascinated by decadence, drawn to what hovers between eros and death. The aesthetics of the time were in fact marked by a double tension: on the one hand, a delicate and idealized eroticism, traceable not only in the choice of female subjects depicted with regal elegance but also in decorative motifs, shaped by sinuous lines inspired by the natural world; on the other, an attention to beauty imbued with fragility, inclined toward dissolution. Not by chance, Arthur Danto, describing Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, noted this coexistence:
“It is surprising how Klimt’s women’s flesh contrasts almost morbidly[4] with the fabrics, stones, and metals surrounding them. It is pale, almost necrotic. […] Ornament is the state to which the figures aspire, and they seem to undergo a marine metamorphosis that finally transforms them into something beyond life, desire, and decomposition.”[5]

Magli’s performance unexpectedly staged that decadence hidden behind the beauty of the female body. Conceived as a reverse striptease, Banana morbid opens with the artist on stage wearing only a light pink veil[6]. To the atonal music of John Cage, Magli performs a tap-dance choreography, enriched by movements, winks, and poses inspired by soubrettes, seemingly announcing an unveiling. Yet this never happens: instead, the act of dressing becomes central. The various elements of the costume, designed by Cinzia Ruggeri, are progressively donned, covering the body more and more – thus subverting the expectations of the male gaze that reduces woman to object.

While reviewing the costume during the exhibition’s preparation, Magli recognized how even the colors of its different layers evoked the “ages” of woman and their inexorable succession: pink recalls a child’s intact body; red, amorous passion; purple and black, old age and death.[7]

The female figure of Banana morbid both underscores and simultaneously plays with the morbid quality of the male gaze, showing her contradictory “softness” and, with it, the artificiality of every idealization of female beauty.

As always, Valeria Magli does so with irreverent irony: cultured and refined, yet capable of dialoguing both with the avant-garde and with the disarming simplicity – one that plays, with little mediation, with food and sex – of a barroom joke[8].

Caterina Molteni

The text is part of Caterina Molteni’s research project From Poetry to Performance and Vice Versa: When Body and Language Become Political. A comparative study of Valeria Magli, Yvonne Rainer, Cecilia Vicuña, supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (13th edition, 2024).

Caterina Molteni is curator at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Her research explores the relationships between visual arts, poetry, and performance, with particular attention to their political implications. In 2024–25 she received the Library Research Grant from the Getty Research Institute and is among the winners of Italian Council 13. From 2016 to 2019 she worked at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli–Turin, and from 2014 to 2019 she co-founded and directed Tile Project Space, a non-profit space in Milan dedicated to Italian art.

[1] Valeria Magli, Valeria Magli in “Scena”, 1978.

[2] Poesia ballerina. Azioni su testi poetici danzate da Valeria Magli is the title of the first retrospective dedicated to Valeria Magli, presented at the Teatro di Porta Romana in 1980. The artist explains how this title – born almost out of necessity (the evening needed a name independent of the three works presented) and in continuity with the multiple redefinitions that poetry had undergone in the preceding decades – sound, phonetic, visual, concrete – over time became a true conceptualization of her work, an expression now inextricably linked to her artistic research.

[3] Banana morbid, 1980, voice and dance: Valeria Magli, text: Nanni Balestrini, costumes and set: Cinzia Ruggeri, music: John Cage, choreography: Umberto Gallone, direction: Lorenzo Vitalone.

[4] It is worth noting that Danto also uses the term “morbidly”, whose root in English is shared with that of the German word.

[5] Arthur Danto, “Vienna 1900”, in Encounters & reflections : art in the historical present, The Noonday Press, New York 1991, p.39.

[6] An appearance that, in the theater, was meant to give the spectator the impression of an almost naked body.

[7] The costume designed and created by Cinzia Ruggeri is composed of six overlapping layers, each characterized by a different color: pink, red, yellow, light blue, purple, and black. A significant detail concerns the right sleeve which, unlike the rest of the dress, does not lengthen but progressively shortens: the first layer, pink, covers the entire arm, while the last one, black, reaches just past the elbow. At the end of the performance, Magli wears all the colors, and thus every stage of life.

[8] Valeria Magli speaks about her “Bolognesità” (Bolognese identity) and the blatantly ironic character of her work in the interview Monologhi al telefono, Artribune.