Curator: Monika Branicka

The exhibition of Mariuccia Secol – 1968. II Genesi marks the first presentation of this Italian artist’s work in Poland. We chose for this display a remarkable series of paintings from 1968–1969, entitled II Genesi (The Second Beginning). This body of work reflects a pivotal moment, both in the history of Italy’s social transformation and in Secol’s artistic journey.

Born in 1929, Secol recalls this period as an era of rebellion—not her own, but that of her children’s generation, who took part in tumultuous protests and political upheavals. Yet it was precisely at this time that Secol sensed a shift—not only within the conservative Italian society but also within herself, as both a woman and an artist.

The paintings she created then, paradoxically traditional, made using the ancient encaustic technique with natural beeswax, embody the artist’s own rebirth. II Genesi consists of abstract works, in which form, colour, and texture subtly evoke fragments of the female body—the symbolic battleground in the struggle for freedom at the time. This series was also her final cycle of paintings; thereafter, she dedicated herself primarily to textiles, sculpture, and textile-based objects.

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This house stands utop a hill in a tiny town in northern Italy, set between Lago Maggiore and Lago di Como. The view from the windows opens onto a fantastic garden, populated by grand trees over a century old set against a breathtaking vista of the valley below. It’s paradise. The house is inhabited by the 96-year-old artist Mariuccia Secol. It was in houses such as this one, that the often forgotten cultural revolution of the 1960s took place.

The start of the 1960s was mild, not giving any hints about what was set to happen. After finishing her artistic education, Mariuccia Secol married a renowned doctor, partisan, future mayor of the town, and they had four children together. Their house soon became the gathering place for the local intellectual elite. Mariuccia did what most Italian wives and mothers: she took care of the family, the house, guests, dogs and cats and she cooked delicious risotto. However, despite her roles of the doctors wife, mother, cook and cleaner, she had one more–an artist. She could be considered lucky that her husband was not adverse to that, as he painted himself – though as an artist he is unlikely to go down in the history of art. The whole family was closely linked to art: familiar artists, writers, journalists and composers frequently visited their house to converse about art and politics all while savouring her famed risotto. “Our house quickly became a kind of cultural centre, where artists came and went, inviting new ones.” – reminisces Mariuccia. In the attic she created her studio space, where she painted abstract works typical of the 1950s and 1960s.

Around a decade later, Mariuccia wrote a short story–a fable about Maria, who cooks delicious risotto daily for all of her seventeen children: one day a yellow one, the next–red, the following with peas, after that with shrimp, then beans, wine, frog legs, with chestnuts, with champagne, with mushrooms and another one with quail. Then, after having cooked risotto a million times, she decided to cook a risotto … with love. Soon the risotto takes over her whole house: the red one climbes into bed, the white one enters into plant pots, yellow scrambles into ashtrays, the one with frog legs makes its way into humidifiers, shrimp climbs into the television set, and that quail one into the radio. And before Maria notices the risotto with love wraps itself around her neck to strangle her.

The year 1968 arrived. Europe was seething. Mariuccia Secol’s children were attending political demonstrations. “The young were fighting the system, and within them my sons and daughters along with their friends. However, my role of housekeeper remained unchanged. I was constantly cooking for the young people involved in the fight. While other artists were working on ways to represent this struggle, I wasn’t able to take up this subject. It wasn’t my fight, despite that as a parent I was naturally very involved” she recalls.

In March of the same year, one of Mariuccia’s close friends and writer – Guido Piovene gifts her his book titled Furies. Mariuccia made him a promise then, which Piovene commemorated in a dedication on the first page: “For Mariuccia Secol, who promised, she would allow me to find – bettered – some of these Furies in her paintings”. In that moment something irreversibly breaks in Mariuccia. She paints the series II. Genesi. It is the last series of paintings she ever makes, she never returned to painting. With that, a new Mariuccia Secol is born: a feminist. “In the political movement of 1968, young people were very close to the social situation of women. It was also happening at home, therefore it concerned me even more. It seemed as though my children had become my allies against their father – the mighty man of the house. It was visible even more so, as my husband was an excellent professional, a well respected and revered doctor in our community. We were the weaker, subordinate side – but at the same time allied, consequently undermining the paternal domination. It was that inferior group, that opposed the authorities by fighting. Personally, I felt discomfort, because the patriarchal culture which formed me, was pressuring me to comply, making me co-responsible. This, in turn, gave birth to my conscious rebellion, which allowed me to change the situation. The title of this series is supposed to signify the birth of another person, built on new ideals. A new person.”

After II. Genesi there was no returning to the old life. Secol realised that “women have no voice and we don’t exist”. That inspired her following works of art – abstract sculptures made of prefabricated plastic elements used in building sites, entitled Silent Musical Instruments (1970). In the ensuing years she started using textiles as her artistic medium, her sculptures were now being made from her old clothes. Secol then proceeded to create artworks based on broken plates and steel scouring pads, which she named Instruments of Women’s Roles (1975). Her pieces speak about domestic violence, exclusion and abortion. After reading Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Mariuccia Secol began working on series under the same title, which she continued for many years. One of the newer works, made after the year 2000 are small, abstract Obstacles for Dolls. When asked about their meaning she replies “…it’s for girls to learn, that their life won’t be easy.”

Boycotting household chores became the core of Mariuccia’s artistic practice. She was not alone in that approach. Her closest friend Milli Gandini – a fellow artist, used barbed wire to tie pots and pans together with their lids. She also sent her husband and children to eat meals in the restaurant on the ground floor of the building they lived in on a daily basis. At home she prohibited them from dusting any surfaces. After a larger amount of dust accumulated on the furniture, Milli used her finger to write in it the words: Salario al Lavoro domestico – Salary for Household Labour.

Their art was socially engaged: the artists organised themselves into a “feminist-creative” collective, they protested, wrote manifests, published texts in the journal Le operaje della casa (The House Workers) and made contact with feminist groups in different parts of Italy. Aesthetic necessity wasn’t something that motivated their art, rather, it was real pain and anger and they found that activism had a tangible social effect.

Secol and Gandini weren’t the only ones who used sabotaging household chores as a subversive artistic practise. This phenomenon was noticeable around the world. The same year that Mariuccia stretches her apron onto frames instead of a canvas (Instrument’s of Women’s Roles, 1975), Austrian artist Birgit Jürgenssen creates the object Housewife’s Kitchen Apron and the American artist Martha Rosler films her seminal video Semiotics of the Kitchen. In Italy similar themes are explored by Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga (Bianca Menna) and Ketty la Rocca, and in Poland by artists such as Maria Pinińska-Bereś and Ewa Partum. The revolution whose main weapons were aprons, pots, pans and vacuum cleaners erupted in kitchens across the globe.

A petite Mariuccia Secol, with thin, wrinkled hands sits on the edge of her bed and tells stories of the events that took place over half a century ago. She remembers everything. She talks about how in 1974, together with Milli and other women (Clemen Parocchetti, Silvia Cibaldi, Mariagrazia Sironi) they created the feminist activism group Immagine (Gruppo Femminista Immagine di Varese). In 1976 they traveled to Verona, to protest in front of the courthouse, where a trial for rape was taking place – there, for the first time in Italy, under the pressure of feminist protests, a rapist was sentenced for his act. She also talks about 1977, when on stage at a festival in Frascati they wrote: “Love is also a household chore”. About how in Milan they organised a conference about visual art titled “Woman, Art, Society”, at which they proclaimed equal rights for women and mothers within the official art system. She also recounts their biggest success, the exhibition Spazio Aperto presented during the 1978 Biennale in Venice.

Mariuccia now shows me her book, in which – together with Milli – they wrote down everything. She published the book recently, at the age of 92. The title was inspired by their joint exhibition of 1980 in Varese La mamma é uscita (Mother Has Left). On the occasion of this exhibition, her fellow artist Bruno Munari wrote a commentary in the form of a short dialogue:

– Mother has left.

-Left where? She was furious this morning.

-She left, to look for herself.

-But where?

-Inside herself.

-So she didn’t leave.

-It’s a saying, sometimes one leaves the other way, in the opposite direction. It means that one isn’t washing dishes anymore, now one is washing paintbrushes.

-So she is doing art?

-Art is a woman.

-Logic is a man.

-Balance happens when art and logic become one.

-Mother was about to lose her balance.

-Now she has rediscovered it.

By the 1980s and 1990s nobody was interested in feminism. The world had other problems and everyone forgot about artists along the likes of Mariuccia Secol (and most likely many others) and how much her generation did for us. Only recently have they started being rediscovered, though even in the Italian environment not many know the name Secol. Only a few years ago her works were shown in major exhibitions about feminist art, such as The unexpected Subject. 1978 – Art and Feminist in Italy In FM Centre for Contemporary Art in Milan and Cooking Cleaning Caring. Care Work in the Arts since 1960 at the Joseph Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop.

I am looking at her beautiful, small and wrinkled hands and I think about the times they must have bled, when during work she stabbed herself with a needle. Mariuccia will go down in the history of art. I’m sure of it.

Monika Branicka