“Corps-poe sie” is the first solo exhibition in France by Tomaso Binga (b. 1931 in Salerno, lives and works in Rome). A major figure on the Italian art scene since the late 1960's, the exhibition spans several decades and themes – identity and gender, social critique, the reappropriation of language, the manifest body – while also including previously unseen work. 

Tomaso Binga is the pseudonym that Bianca Pucciarelli Menna has used, with irony and an eye on the future, since 1971, to challenge the privileges of the masculine world of society in general and the art world in particular. Her practice involves collage, assemblage, poetry, painting and performance. Through her writings, which shift elegantly between text and image, she is one of the leading figures of Italian performance poetry. 

“Corps-poe sie”, in dialogue with the residential nature of the art centre's architecture, is witness to the importance and vitality of a unique practice in today's artistic, social and political context.

PREAMBULE / STATEMENT

And Bianca became Tomaso... the 1970's were a milestone in the history of italian art in terms of socio-political consciousness and dissent , through a number of iniziatives led by women artists, curators and art critics. The Italian feminist movement emphasised the reconsideration of women as political subjects, claiming their right to self-determination over their bodies, work and sexuality. On 15 June 1977, Bianca Pucciarelli Menna and her alter ego Tomaso Binga held a fictitious wedding at Campo D gallery in Rome. This celebration was the ultimate metamorphosis of Bianca, a politically committed woman, into Tomaso, first and foremost a masculine artist, and sealed the seven-year relationship between the two. The choice of Tomaso as first name is a tribute to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), founder of the Futurist movement. While Bianca/Tomaso was fascinated by this writer and poet, she was also aware of his contradictions, including the Futurists' fascist leanings and their undeniable misogyny. When she appropriated the name, she dropped the second “m” from “Tommaso” to underline the element of dominant masculinity, thus destabilising the word's sonorous and visual core. This spelling and semantic manipulations allow her to set her own rules and emphasizes chal structure: “Her chosen surname 'Binga' was a distorted spelling of an infantile pronunciation of her real first name, Bianca. In its new version, the name obtained a rigid and vocal 'g' at its centre, instead of the tender and muffled 'nc'1.¹

LA FEMME ET LE PAPIER PEINT / IO SONO UNA CARTA
i Am A Piece of wall PaPer
i Am A Piece of pAPer
i Am A Piece of pAPerboArd
A Piece of cArdboArd
A...cArtriDge
And must be...fiiiiiiiired!!
BOOM...!!²

Boom indeed, or maybe Binga! In the poem “iO sOnO unA cArtA” (I Am A Piece of plain Paper), Tomaso Binga doesn't paper over anything. Here language and performative installations reveal the emergence of a certain subjectivity, the invention of language, of her own challenge to the patriarchal society of 1970s Italy. 

For the immersive installation Carta da parato (Wallpaper), which opened on 17 May 1976 in the Casa Malangone in Rome, Tomaso Binga covered the walls of this private house with rolls of floral wallpaper, on which she wrote by hand an asemantic writing: “I'm working on words and sentences, transforming them into micro-writings to reach a de-semantisation. “I'm sending you some photos of a performance I did in Rome, covering the walls of a house with wallpaper, to which I added my writing.”³ By covering the walls with the free-flowing lines of asemantic writing, Tomaso Binga reveals the invisible, muted presence of women confined to domestic spaces, signalling their imposed silence and creative potential. 

Two years later, for the group exhibition “Metafisica del quotidiano” in Bologna, Tomaso Binga reactivated this installation, incorporating a performance in which she wore a dress made of the same wallpaper to read her poem iO sOnO unA cArtA.⁴ For La Galerie, this work has been updated once again, to incorporate architectural elements of the former solicitor's home in Noisy-le-Sec. The wallpaper covers the length of the walls, following the arched French windows of the villa's former grand salon. In the room, Tomaso Binga's voice plays constantly, including a recent recording of the the poem iO sOnO unA cArtA, to which a group of four collaged albums covered with the same wallpaper, respond. 

The group of drawings on one of the walls in this same room-presented to the public for the first time-are hung in a constellation. These were the first works Bianca Pucciarelli Menna produced while working in a primary school in the 1960s, where the children nicknamed her “Binga Banga”. It was while watching one of the children drawing the infinity symbol that she decided to experiment and evolve these simple forms: beetwen graphic lines and solid colours, these drawing conjure characters from her imagination, freed from all background and context, in the same way her approach to writing is relieved of all semantic burdens.

COLLAGES / ASSEMBLAGES

In the first half of the 1970s Tomaso Binga developed a body of work that the art critic Italo Mussa (1939-1990) called “object images”⁵, in which the artist recycled polystyrene packaging and juxtaposed it with images taken from newspapers and magazines. Tomaso Binga incorporated the packaging without alteration, preserving the imprints of the objects it originally contained. Expanded polystyrene is considered here for its own sake; it holds no meaning, not even any metaphorical meaning. It is examined as a sculptural from, occupying an exact volume in space and it also acts as a framework for the creation of a collage. Like the artist's first assemblage, Tempo perduto (Lost time), produced in 1971, representations form and stories are told through the overlaying of images and shapes. By reappropriating images found in the media and advertising in this series of polystyrenes, Tomaso Binga takes an alternative view of consumer society, household objects and domestic space. 

In a continual interplay between image and writing, the analogue portraits revisit the genre by distorting traditional representations. For these portraits, Tomaso Binga developed a collage technique in which she intertwined images of details (legs, hands, mouths, etc.) and letters writen in felt-tip pen, which represent the initials of the person portrayed. This graphical symbol replaces detailed descriptive representations, an echoof the artist's reflections on the relationship between words and images. 

The practice of collage has been constant throughout Tomaso Binga's artistic production since the 1970s. In August 2017 the artist worked on maritime photographs that a friend sent to her each day via email. Through juxtaposition and analogy, the cut-out and torn elements that Tomaso Binga glued onto these images conjure the tears of mermaids.

THE MANIFEST BODY

Tomaso Binga began using asemantic writing (Scrittura desemantizzata) as early as 1972. The artist has described this form of automatic, illegible writing as “subliminal and silent” and as “a living being which proliferates like cells invading the environment” The process of asemantic writing has become a tool for liberating the self from the weight imposed by meaning and linguistic rules Stripped back, the writing becomes almost subliminal, acting on the spectator regardless of the words' factual or symbolic meaning. 

The rigour and commitment to emancipation is evident in the performative work Tomaso Binga has created throughout her career, such as Donna in gabbia (Caged woman), a performance dating from 1974. Donna in gabbia challenges the manipulation of women's images by male artists in the history of modern and contemporary art, and ironically reappropriates certain iconographies and gestures. Wearing a traditional bonnet, Tomaso Binga places her head in a birdcage, recalling the female mannequin the artist Andre Masson (1896-1987) staged as part of the Exposition Internationale du Surre alisme in Paris in 1938. 

An ode to the woman she is and she embodies, A me (To me) blends asemantic writing and performance, making the artist's body a vehicle that is simultaneously artistic, social and political. In this work, the body receives a new kind of attention; it is used for a complex semantic purpose which can be read in different ways. The Scrittura arrampicata (Climbing Writings) series allows the moment of connection between writing and the the body: by giving the impression of overlapping lines of writing, Tomaso Binga creates free compositions where the body alphabet is harmoniously intertwined with segments of asemantic writing.

RHYTHMICAL GRAPHICAL BIOGRAPHICAL

The series Scrittura vivente (Living writing) materialises the synthesis of the body's relationship to space in Tomaso Binga's work. In it, the artist formed the letters of the alphabet with her naked body. These silhouettes first appeared in 1975, when her friend, the photographer Verita Monselles (1929-2005) invited her to her studio to pose. The body as alphabet became the catalyst for several of Tomaso Binga's works in the second half of the 1970s, for instance Alfabeto murale (Alphabet mural). For this group, she literally transformed her body into writing, in all its physical, social and political dimensions, to create a radical alternative to patriarchal language. 

Following on from asemantic writing and in an attempt to further depersonalise writing, in 1978 Tomaso Binga began developing a new body of work using a dedicated typewriter: the Dattilocodice (Typecodes) are visual poems, created by superimposing the letters of the alphabet. This superimposition doesn't produce illegible text or optic visual games; on the contrary it suggests a very fine stylisation of the symbols, one where the alphabetical letter no longer resemble themselves: by becoming denser, disappearing and stretching, the letters create abrupt sequences of randomly invented ideograms. 

In the 1980s Tomaso Binga applied her gestual writing experiments to the scale and texture of canvas. The resulting series of large-format paintings feature colourful silhouettes of quivering words and letters that stand out from the canvas. 

¹ Daria Khan, Tomaso Binga: A Silenced Victory (London: Mimosa House, 2019)
² Extract from, Tomaso Binga, iO sOnO unA cArtA, trad. Jacopo Bengi in Daria Khan, Tomaso Binga: A silenced Victory (London: Mimosa House, 2019)
³ Letter from Tomaso Binga to Rolf Burmeister, director of the Universitat Hamburg library, 4 October 1976
⁴ Metafisica del quotidiano (Metaphysics of the everyday), Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Bologna, curated by Franco Solmi, 1 June to 31 August 1978
⁵ In the catalogue for the exhibition “Diagramma 32” in Neaples in 1972