Chiara Fumai: Poems I Will Never Release (2007-2017)

Three years after her untimely death, the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato dedicates the retrospective Poems I Will Never Release to Chiara Fumai, curated by Milovan Farronato and Francesco Urbano Ragazzi in collaboration with Cristiana Perrella.

The exhibition is part of a larger project that brings together various European institutions with the aim of revisiting the artist’s work, preserving her legacy and presenting it to a wider audience. A thorough  investigation into a creative personality who left behind an indelible mark on the languages ​​of performance and feminist aesthetics of the 21st century.

Poems I Will Never Release brings together a complete corpus of works, which translate Chiara Fumai’s performances into material form, while respecting the artist’s programmatic intent not to document them.

Rebelling against a sort of latent prejudice linked to her being a woman artist, Chiara Fumai has developed a vocabulary of threat, revolt, violence but also boredom, capable of triggering uncomfortable situations, to promote her ideals of anarchist feminism. Her works, collages, environments and actions, evoke female figures who, with their courage and their anger, left a mark only to be excluded or forgotten; among them Annie Jones, the “bearded lady” and Zalumma Agra, the “Circassian beauty”, both part of P.T. Barnum, the German terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, the illiterate Italian medium Eusapia Palladino, the socialist revolutionary and philosopher Rosa Luxemburg, the feminist writer Carla Lonzi and many others.