A poet, visual artist and one of Italy’s leading exponents of Visual Poetry, Lucia Marcucci (b. Florence, 1933) turns words into a live material that is constantly reinvented by putting it at the center of an artistic practice spanning image, body and performance. Francesco Ventrella’s contribution that we are presenting in this edition of Bulletin stems from two recent Museion study opportunities dedicated to the artist: the publication of the book Lucia Marcucci. Tutto qui? (bruno, Venice, 2025), edited by Frida Carazzato (Museion) and Francesca Verga (Ar/Ge Kunst) and the study day entitled, Feminist Resonances between Text and Image: Visual Practices since the 1970s, held last May at the University of Sussex – where Ventrella teaches Art History. Bringing together women visual arts scholars and artists, the conference - organized by Ventrella, Carazzato and Verga - examined the “feminist resonances” between word and image, an area of research that runs through Marcucci’s entire oeuvre and which her art has constantly helped to redefine and demystify.
Tongue-in-cheek is an English idiom that describes statements which are made only half-seriously. They begin with conviction but end with a grin, indicating that the speaker really believes the opposite of what they are saying and has chosen irony to share an opinion that may be uncomfortable. Despite appearing funny, then, these observations often contain important truths. And this is why, in certain situations, making a tongue in cheek comment can provoke genuine reflection. It is clearly a critique, but it is an accurate critique, communicated in an amusing and light-hearted way. This English idiom, used as both an adverb and adjective, is not exactly a metaphor, but a description of a particular facial expression in which the tongue is pressed against the inside of the cheek to indicate that what the speaker is about to say should not be taken too seriously.
We could say that Lucia Marcucci’s work also presses the tongue against the body to question the relationships between gestures and meanings that our capitalist and patriarchal culture conveys as natural and inevitable. Like when she uses a typical photo-romance layout, Marcucci works with a visual grid that also has a powerful social and cognitive value, given the role the photo-romance played in constructing a romanticized image of femininity in post-Second World War Italian culture. Her collage Stanze (1971), for example, is presented as a catalog of gestures in which the words of prominent politicians from the time clash with a series of female stereotypes.
She says: «Un modo d’acquisto sempre più diffuso, valido, logico e comodo» (“An increasingly widespread, valid, logical, and convenient purchasing process”).
«La fede» (“Faith”), is Andreotti’s seemingly ironic response.
«Quando un uomo decide» (“When a man makes a decision”), opines Fanfani. «Il cuore me lo dice» (“My heart tells me”), she concludes.
The fact that the meaning of these imaginary conversations changes if the reading direction is reversed, shows that the material Marcucci works with contains not only verbal or visual meanings, but also tones and resonances. Men’s words are crushed beneath the contrasting weight of scantily clad, glossy magazine models’ bodies. The collage therefore denounces the commodification of women’s bodies in Italian society, while also showing how irony can unleash their disruptive power to dismantle the complete pretense of the power dynamics that had up until then supported male ‘meaning’.
Using a foreign idiom to investigate Lucia Marcucci’s work also invites us to consider the resonance of her art in an international context. This, in fact, was the spirit behind the study day, organized to celebrate the publication of the volume Lucia Marcucci. Tutto qui?. Held at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, Feminist Resonances between Text and Image: Visual Practices since the 1970s brought together various women visual arts scholars and artists to reflect on the ‘feminist resonance’ between word and image that Marcucci has continually demystified throughout her long career. Even if the relationship between word and image has long been a subject of study in contemporary art history, at Sussex we wanted to investigate how second-wave feminism has shaped this combined use of text and image by artists and cultural operators, and turned it into a tool for critiquing the power dynamics that permeate visual and verbal representation.
Seen next to the works of British artists, Annabel Nicolson and Alison Lloyd, or the Austrian Birgit Jürgenssen, some of the artists discussed at Sussex reveal a surprising number of resonances with Marcucci’s art. Resonances that focus on body positioning and corporeality in relation to language, the function of the voice, and the physical reactivation of meaning through performance. Visual poetry was born from the need of the neo-avant-garde to rethink the relationship of language to reality in a concrete way. As our keynote speaker Karen Di Franco, wrote about the works of Nancy Holt, «the term ‘concrete’ functions distinctively as an adjective defining the direct unity and continuous connection between an object and language.» (Di Franco, 2022). The presentations at the study day indicated how visual poetry, as well as other text and image experiments developed since the Second World War, often cross the boundaries between private and public space. The scholars focused on various fields of activity, including album pages, flyers, archives, magazines, ASMR videos, photography, and social media platforms… highlighting the mobile, transmedia nature of the relationship between image and text.
Our project is therefore part of a wider research horizon that looks at the difference women artists have made to international visual and concrete poetry networks. In their anthology on Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–1979 (2020), in which Lucia Marcucci appears alongside over fifty other international women artists, the authors Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre emphasize how embodiment — the act of giving language a physical, bodily form — was a genuine cultural battleground for the visual and concrete poetry of that time, as it sought to deconstruct the feminine mystique in postwar consumer culture. Marcucci has always been clear about this positioning of “semiotic guerrilla warfare,” like when she writes about the imprint of the body being a material and natural encumbrance that we must move and insert everywhere into our daily experience:
«The body and the triumphal arches, the body and the skyscraper, the body and the book, the body and the sculpture, the body and the political symbol, the body and the photography of the body, the body and the hero, the body and the landscape modified by the «cultural animal» (Marcucci, 2014).
Continuing in the tradition of the collage launched at the end of the First World War by Hannah Höch who ‘cut with a kitchen knife’ the patriarchal power and male culture of the Weimar Republic (Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauch-Kulturepoche Deutschlands, 1919), Lucia Marcucci’s work, when observed years later, seems to transcend the limits set by an oeuvre already applied to the Italian language, partly because it begins to create unexpected connections with other feminist neo-avant-garde artists who, like Linder and Martha Rosler, had turned the cut-up method into a radical technique of subversion and resistance.
Francesco Ventrella (Martina Franca, 1979) teaches contemporary art at the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. His research focuses on the interaction between love, writing, and art, especially in the sphere of feminist and queer stories. His publications include Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy. The Legacy of Carla Lonzi (2022).
