LE SCHIAVONE

“…ED IO VIDI NELLE NOSTRE VALLATE CRETINI CHE ALLA LUNGHEZZA DEL CRANIO, ALLA SPORGENZA DEL MUSO, ALLA GROSSEZZA DELLE LABBRA E PERFINO ALL’OSCURAMENTO DELLA PELLE PAREVANO NEGRI MALAMENTE IMBIANCATI.” [1]

L’UOMO BIANCO E L’UOMO DI COLORE, CESARE LOMBROSO

Labor and the diminished social value of laborers is the element that characterizes the works of art in Le Schiavone. This section deals directly with dirt, labor, and becoming dirt. It makes use of a series of symbols to entrench women’s manual labor in the long history of art moving beyond the sexualized pornography of the patriarchal and classist gaze. Women’s identification with the definition of Schiavona in Italy places them in a specific rung of the social ladder: at the very bottom of it. These are women that labored — selling their bodies for work in the fields or survival — to ensure that their families and progeny would cling to life. Being directly associated with dirt and the lowliest labors makes them dirty and reduces them to the level of dirt. It is a process of reduction and encrustation that denies these women any role in the patriarchal state. They are not mothers, tainted as they are by the shadow of a sexually improper lifestyle typical of all destitute women; they are not workers, because their jobs are so abject that cannot be acknowledged, even if socially necessary, by the patriarchal rhetoric of the nation-state; and they are not women, because their lowly status does not make them beautiful or appealing but rather feral, wild, and savage. It is these women — seen as harpies, witches, and crones — that the works of art acknowledge, bringing back their hidden instances to the fore as a reminder that life as we know it was built upon the effort that these women made, securing the survival of their families and their communities.

Le Schiavone is one of ten sections of Lanfranco Aceti’s installation titled Preferring Sinking to Surrender which was conceived by the artist for the Italian Pavilion, Resilient Communities, curated by Alessandro Melis for the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2021. The ten sections are: Tools for Catching Clouds; Preferring Sinking to Surrender, Part I; Preferring Sinking to Surrender, Part II; Sacred Waters; Le Schiavone; Orthós; Seven Veils; Signs; Rehearsal; and The Ending of the End. These sections, singularly and collectively, create a complex narrative that responds to this year’s theme How Will We Live Together? set by Hashim Sarkis, curator of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

The works of art — realized as a series of performances, installations, sculptures, video, and painting contributions — are part of the installation at the Italian Pavilion from May 21, 2021, to November 21, 2021, the opening and closing dates of the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Le Schiavone is a sculptural installation and performance that, together with drawings and photographs, explores the complexity of labor and women’s condition in the countryside in Italy. It is strictly linked to the notion of water as a life-giving element and to the cult of the Goddess that, although sidelined and pushed aside, still plays a role as part of a rustic religiosity in parts of Italy. The notion of life, according to the Goddess, is also an understanding of reality and as such a socio-political stance that has seen these women resist for millennia the patriarchal structures of life and cling, albeit subconsciously, to notions of matriarchalism that are part of cultural and behavioral traditions passed on within local families.

Le Schiavone explores the meaning of manual labor in the fields and at home in a context in which capitalistic notions of progress and post-postmodern ways of life are dealing the last blows to millennia of socially oriented forms of shared living. It is not an Arcadic presentation of a world bygone, as in much of the Anglo-Saxon revisitation and fetishization of lower classes’ conditions and exploitation, but rather a rebellious display of anger and opportunities embedded in tools made to plant seedlings or to gauge eyes out.

The women here, although enslaved to the land and family, are examples of resilience and resistance, of a stubborn and determined willful vital strength, and of bravery and courage in the face of patriarchal social mores that want them silenced and defeated.

Le Schiavone explores the classification of peasants into the ranks of unmentionables and untouchables through performance, photography, installations, wood sculptures, choreographed dance, and drawings. Inspired by a long tradition of the representation of farmers and peasants, this set of works of art focuses on dirt and being dirty. In particular, it historically repositions women laborers’ struggles — which in Italy were called schiavone, hence the Black Madonna of Montevergine popularly being called Mamma Schiavona — in a post-modern context of water theft, land pollution, discrimination of the diverse, and the financial enslavement of the people.

Contrary to the contemporary focus on youth and beauty, Le Schiavone emphasizes issues of race (being black or non-white, since peasants were not considered white) and class, in a context in which Mamma Schiavona, or The Great Black Mediterranean Mother, is displaced from her historical roots of life-giving lymph and is instead condemned to exist in a landscape of greed and pollution.

Similarly to Des Glaneuses (The Gleaners) by Jean-François Millet, Le Schiavone makes its own overt and rebellious critique of contemporary society, labor practices in a capitalistic framework, and the exploitation of water and land in an evermore industrialized food production chain. The works of art, in this particular context, also allude to the deprivation of women’s power in the food production chain. No longer autonomous or semi-autonomous depositaries of precious family knowledge symbiotically tied to the state of nature and horticultural diversity, women are expected to exist within the remits of an industrial patriarchal complex which legislatively burdens small homesteads, impeding local food production. The impossibility of food autonomy and bartering signals the impossibility of a matriarchal existence outside of patriarchal capitalistic ownership and control. Nevertheless, the periphery continues to resist, albeit barely, through the flaunting of laws, the blatant disregard of restrictions, and in contrast to centralized power, which grows weaker the more peripheral existence becomes. The escape from the centralized power of patriarchy obliges people to exist at the fringes as social outcasts and therefore vulnerable to the discriminatory punishment and invasive control of the nation state.

References:

[1] “[…] and I saw in our valleys cretins who because of the length of the skull, the protruding of the face, the thickness of the lips and even the darkness of the skin looked like negroes badly painted white.” The translation is mine. Cesare Lombroso, L’Uomo Bianco e L’Uomo di Colore: Letture su l’Origine e la Varietà delle Razze Umane (Firenze, Torino, and Roma: Fratelli Bocca, Librai di S.M. il Re d’Italia, 1892), 172.

Image Captions:

Lanfranco Aceti, The Insatiable Thirst of the Serpent of the Goddess, 2021. Ooze and soil. Sculptural installation. Dimensions: 20,000 cm. Photographic print from the sculptural installation. Dimensions: 67 cm. x 100 cm.

Lanfranco Aceti, Untitled, 2021. Photographic print. Dimensions: 100 cm. X 67 cm.