A voice moves through me, saying:
The first time I used the recorder I said, ‘But what is happening?’ I didn’t really understand, I really felt strange with this device, it isn’t something that’s so obvious, and then I said, ‘Well, it’s logical that I felt this way,’ that is, I want to be close to artists and to free myself, as a person who may have this academic culture…Because the funny thing is that the critic learns what the artist is while at university, he learns all about historical texts and then, his own conception of the artist, of the critic, and of culture and then he never questions them ever again, with a recorder or otherwise.
You are reading the transcribed voice of Carla Lonzi, speaking in her book Self-Portrait, through Allison Grimaldi Donahue’s new English translation (published by Divided Publishing, 2021). The same voice sends me on my way, running distractedly on a course comprised of a sequence of bends in the form of texts, images, further voices and a video. This photo offers you a rough roadmap:
I set off from Lonzi’s voice, flying passed Claire Fontaine’s Afterword (look, a thread!), into the first bend where Clare Butcher’s ‘Curriculum’ entry in the documenta 14 aneducation book meets her contribution to the book Curriculum: Contemporary Art Goes to School called ‘Preparatory Gestures for a Future Curriculum’.
I turn into the second bend where a photograph of Barbara Casavecchia sitting and speaking at Delphi to a group of gathered students (the decisive moment referenced by Butcher), joins her essays ‘Taci, anzi parla’ (do you see the hands of Ketty La Rocca?) and ‘Meanings of her own through a language of her own’, each channeling Lonzi in their own ways.
The third bend finds the recording, referenced by Butcher and played by Casavecchia, of Maria Lai telling the story of Maria Pietra rubbing up against an artist book of the same story, translated into English (look, another thread!).
And the fourth bend? There is no fourth bend.
I have left the track behind and am running through open fields, into the city, towards the sea, onto the platform, along the shore, to wait for the siren on a train, riding on a broom. It is Anna Raimondo and her voice – her true voice – has arrived with her.
I press the red button on my voice recorder and she begins to tell me of a big future.
I listen and learn. Click the image below to do the same.
