Euforia Tomaso Binga

The unpredictable course of life often flattens into fundamental, dualistic choices: yes or no, follow or lead, stay or go? Navigating such binaries means, more often than not, being haunted by the unchosen option. And yet, at certain moments, the burden of decision lifts: we find ourselves at a threshold where choice does not foreclose possibility, but instead invites multiplicity. Such is the effect of the entrance to Euforia Tomaso Binga FIG.1 at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples (Madre). Curated by Eva Fabbris and Daria Khan, it is the most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of the Italian artist Tomaso Binga (b.1931), bringing together over 120 works that span poetry, installation, photography, collage, archival material and performance documentation. The exhibition offers two entryways – left or right – but neither route is marked by finality or constraint. Rather, eschewing chronology, it adopts a deliberately open, almost meandering structure – one that reflects Binga’s sustained engagement with visual poetry and its embodied, performative and political entanglements. Binga is preoccupied with fundamental themes – relationships, power structures, language – but her work does not unfold as a narrative of rupture, stark choices or sudden change. An economy of means and the recurrence of motifs lend her practice a sense of the everyday that is diaristic without being overtly biographical. It is a way of making art that caresses life, gliding along beside it; Euforia invites the viewer to do the same.

Binga was born Bianca Pucciarelli. Her pseudonym – meant to both obscure and liberate – is a reference to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944). It drops one of the ‘m’s from Tommaso – ‘m’ meaning male, as if to say ‘Tommaso but less macho’ – while ‘Binga’ playfully echoes her given name, Bianca, as regularly mispronounced by her childhood friends. This dual identity is succinctly introduced in the photographic diptych Bianca Menna e Tomaso Binga. Oggi spose (Today’s Brides) FIG.2. On the left, ‘Bianca’ stands in a white wedding dress, photographed on the day of the artist’s wedding to the art critic Filiberto Menna. On the right, she adopts the guise of her artistic alter ego, dressed in Filiberto’s clothes. In so doing, Binga enters a rich art-historical lineage of gender-swapped alter egos – from Marcel Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy to Adrian Piper’s The Mythic Being (1972–75). Her performative bifurcation not only parodies gender roles, it reimagines the terms of the artist’s life. Here, drag is used in Queen Hatshepsut fashion: assuming symbols of power not merely to disguise, but to declare. In a single gesture, Binga steps out of the shadow of ‘wife of’ and into artistic selfhood.

Neither a minimalist nor a conceptualist, Binga employs a controlled palette that is attuned to the political voltage of language – whether spoken, written or withheld. For example, her Dattilocodice (Typecodes; 1978), visual poems made with a typewriter, evoke the silent labour of secretaries, typists and administrators, the historically invisible hands and minds behind the male ‘genius’. In Alfabetiere murale (Mural Alphabet) FIG.3 – which uses the artist’s Scrittura vivente (Living Writing), a Latin alphabet created with the photographer Verita Monselles (1929–2005) – Binga twists her naked body into each letterform. The only exception is the letter ‘H’ – never pronounced in the Italian language – for which the artist appears clothed. Additionally, Le straniere (The Foreigners; 1976), comprising letters not used in Italian, are displayed separately. The exhibition includes extensive documentation of the process that led to the alphabet’s final form, including numerous failed attempts. Using the body to teach the alphabet is a common didactic tool – especially apt given Binga’s early career as a schoolteacher, before she became Professor of Theory and Method of Mass Media at the Academy of Fine Arts, Frosinone – but here it also serves to reinsert the corporeal into otherwise disembodied modes of communication.

Contrary to earlier anthropomorphic alphabets, such as Vítězslav Nezval’s Abeceda (1926) and Anthon Beeke’s Body Type (1969), Binga is not an objectified body or silent muse, but rather the author. Her body is the medium, the message and the messenger. These works and related series FIG.4, including her recurring asemic writing, Scrittura desemantizzata (Desemanticised Writing; 1971–ongoing), point towards a pedagogy that does not teach one how to read, but rather how to interrogate silence: what is said when nothing is spoken, and who has the last word. Although silence is a recurring preoccupation in Binga’s work, her voice reverberates throughout the galleries of Madre, emanating from discreetly placed speakers and lending the exhibition an intimate, persistent presence. Feminist poetry readings are not typically associated with laughter, yet Binga’s performances often provoke it. Her poems, designed with great attention to typography, come alive in her amused, impish and commanding delivery, rhythmically reminiscent of nursery rhymes.

Framed by the baroque nature of Naples, Binga’s stripped-down aesthetic and range of materials – a typewriter, printed paper, zigzag scissors – become even more evident. For Binga, art is not intrinsically ‘high’ culture, nor is play simply ‘low’. The boundary between the two, if one exists at all, holds little interest for her. In 1995, for example, she performed a poem about the futility of diet culture on the widely watched Maurizio Costanzo Show to the bemusement of the audience. Meanwhile, her Polistiroli (Polystyrenes) FIG.5 series features elegant abstract compositions crafted from magazine cut-outs, which are then glued onto discarded polystyrene containers. True to Binga’s commitment to upending hierarchies, some works in the exhibition are not framed but are displayed in plastic sleeves. This spirit extends to the exhibition design, which was developed by the Milan-based studio Rio Grande under Binga’s close guidance. The show is linked by recurring pink and red tubular structures FIG.6 that function simultaneously as supports, scenographic elements, seating and conceptual thread. Rio Grande’s bold intervention tackles the challenge of displaying art that requires viewing and reading at once, successfully translating the intimate, literary quality of her work into spatial terms.

Real or staged threads of emotion – particularly involving women – are a constant theme in Binga’s practice. Ti scrivo solo di domenica (I Write You Only On Sundays; 1977–78) is a series of short letters to an imaginary girlfriend using nouns that are gendered feminine in Italian; notably, Sunday is the only day of the week with a feminine gender in Italian. In Ritratti analogici (Analogue Portraits; 1972–75) the artist depicts people she admires and loves through their initials and collaged elements that are emblematic of the physical appearance or personality of her chosen subject. Across these different projects, Binga’s work reveals a longing for connection. Combining the most confusing of feelings with an attempt at emotional taxonomy, the series Grafici di storie d’amore (Graphs of Love Affairs) FIG.7 charts real couples’ romantic trajectories through Cartesian diagrams on graph paper. Some emotional timelines align, others diverge, testament to the asymmetric, often deceiving, inherently elusive nature of love.

Dazzled by a Piet Mondrian exhibition in 1956, Binga – then still Bianca Pucciarelli – would not present her first solo show until 1971. This period coincided with a rapidly shifting Italy, which saw women artists forging paths amid fierce battles for divorce and abortion rights in a society still tightly gripped by Catholic, patriarchal norms. Women of this generation witnessed their world change, sometimes slowly, sometimes violently. And yet there are those, like Binga, who still punch back with the awareness that protest is necessary. But for a revolution to endure, it must also revel in the pleasure of subversion, in the euphoria of liberation.

Binga’s feminist awakening was inseparable from her artistic one, although belief in an ideal, in a cause, can often precede belief in oneself. Despite being married to a renowned art critic – or perhaps precisely because of it – Binga hesitated to step fully into the role of artist. If humour is a tool honed by those struggling to be taken seriously, then her playful word games and jesting mask a demand for recognition of both the political and the personal, the feminist and the artist, Bianca and Tomaso. To borrow from her poem Io sono una carta (I Am a Piece of Paper) FIG.8, Binga’s work is a material that can be coloured, folded and inscribed. But above all, it is a cartuccia, a cartridge still fully loaded, ready to explode: ‘BOOM!!’.