Promotionsvorhaben Sonia d´Alto
Arbeitstitel:
The history within us
Betreuung: Prof. Dr. Nora Sternfeld, Prof. Dr. Jesko Fezer
My practice-based PhD revolves around political imagination in research and curatorial practice, dedicated to counter-hegemonic cultural forms as well as to non-linear transmissions of feminist continuities. The core of the research is committed to artistic collective and collaborative practices with which women artists have taken up from the Women Liberation Movement, weaving relationships between forms of suppressed memories and trans-local forms of resistance, struggle, and rebellion. Through case studies such as Le Nemesiache, Gruppo Immagine/Creatività and Gruppo Immagine di Varese, I delve into mythologies, folklore, rituals, gender questions, and political imagination. The project is the first major inquiry on Italian feminist artistic collective infrastructures and their relation to art, emphasizing an alternative history in the long 1970s in Western tradition— that is, those years of the later 1960s to mid-1980s — in which activism and visual culture played a key role in radical proposals to rewrite inherited societal formations. Although situated within historical Italian feminisms, the research is beyond “standard” female sexual differences of its philosophy and practice, and beyond the indispensable theoretical corpus involving the fields of political militancy, socialism, and radical refusal inherent to the history of feminism in Italy. In doing so, it points to art practices linked to transnational struggles and solidarity, intergenerational memories, and regional historical amnesia. Within the project, it is taken into account other than hegemonic visual, language, and infrastructural artistic grammar — betraying its ideological entanglement in the binary logic of Western discourse. Ancestral knowledge, oral storytelling, and alternative time ecologic will be addressed in a sensorial way to re-mediate memory and diversify historical analysis and creative thinking. From a curatorial frame, the project aims to overcome the unifying logic of preservation, archive, and collection inherited by colonial and patriarchal systems of knowledge, conversely proposing new politics based on re-learning practices to deal with art, commons, labour, and radical care.
The research is one-year (2024) funded by the program Pro Exzellenzia Plus.
Biography
Sonia D’Alto writes, researches and curates engaging with feminist ways of sensing, remembering and organising.
I have collaborated with art institutions, artistic residencies, and collective formations including the Venice Biennale, Museo Madre (Naples), Fondazione Pini (Milan) documenta studies (Kassel), Villa Arson (Nice) Casino Luxembourg (Luxembourg).
My writing has appeared in Critique d’Art , e-flux Journal, Flash Art, Mousse and NERO. A book I have curated is coming soon for Archive Books. Currently, I am a lecturer in the curatorial studies program postgraduate program of KASK in Ghent and a resident at Villa Vassilieff in Paris, supported by AWARE program.