Clemen Parrocchetti. Handmade Militancy.

About

Handmade Militancy presents largely unseen works by Clemen Parrocchetti (1923-2016, Milan) made during the most heated years of 1970s Italian feminism. Parrocchetti found her visual grammar in the materials of domestic labor – needles, spools, bobbins, cooking utensils, medicaments, textiles – repurposed into the subversive tools of denunciation and protest. Parrocchetti’s work speaks to women’s fights for equal pay, divorce bills and the right to abortion, issues that after almost half a century remain at the center of political debate. Handmade Militancy, the first exhibition of Parrocchetti’s work outside of Italy since her death, includes tapestries, assemblages, sewn drawings, a video and archival documentation the artist collected during her militant years. 

Parrocchetti trained at Milan’s Brera Fine Arts Academy while she was already a mother of five. From the early 1970s, Parrocchetti’s nascent feminist voice found expression in works she called “Objects of Feminine Culture,” which she exhibited in alternative art spaces in Milan. In 1978 she joined the feminist Gruppo Immagine of Varese, pioneering in conjugating art and feminist militancy, and showed with them at the 1978 Venice Biennale. While the group disbanded in the mid-1980s, Parrocchetti carried a feminist ethos in her artmaking for over five decades. 

Forsaking the conventional picture frame, the works on display critique and contest female subjugation and objectification, from within the confines of domesticity. The manifesto Memorandum for an Object of Female Culture (1973) presents inflammatory words of red thread painstakingly sutured onto an aluminum sheet for the “still sub-proletarian” woman “pin cushion/mattress/object.” With handmade tapestries, Parrocchetti marches on her call to resist submission and invoke women’s liberation. The title of each work (insistently resonant to this day) is a protest slogan: “Chastity Belt (Watch out for commodification),” “Under custody and repressed,” “Dreaming gender equality” and “Hope for Liberation after Resistance.” 

The exhibition is curated by Sofia Gotti and Caterina Iaquinta and it has been possible thanks to the collaboration of the Clemen Parrocchetti Archive. 

Born into a family of the Lombard aristocracy, Clemen Parrocchetti (1923-2016, Milan) trained in painting at the Brera Academy, which she graduated from in 1956. Across the 1960s, her painterly style shifted from an existentialist realism to an abstract and surreal language. While partaking in the feminist momentum of the early 1970s, her artistic practice underwent a radical change when she started to use textiles and small household objects in her early assemblages, but above all with the introduction of embroidery. In 1978 she joined the Gruppo Immagine of Varese, with which she participated in the 1978 Venice Biennale – a collaboration that lasted for almost all of the 1980s. Going further in her exploration of textiles and embroidery, the 1980s see her explore the themes of classical mythology with a sensitivity towards the metamorphosing body. In her final decade, Parrocchetti focused on the animal world and her relationship to it, formalized in numerous drawings and paintings.