Jole de Freitas. On the fringes of the Italian feminist art of the Seventies

Abstract

Iole de Freitas (1945) is a Brazilian artist who, escaping a totalitarian regime, set up in Milano between 1970 and 1978, initially working for Olivetti. During 1972 she began to experiment with photography and video, making short films in super 8 in color and intricate photographic series, which she exhibited for the first time in June 1973 at the Diagramma gallery, run by Luciano Inga-Pin, opening a decade filled with invitations to major exhibitions devoted to new media, body art and feminist art. Indeed, she catch the attention of the critics and curators Anne Marie Sauzeau, Romana Loda and Barbara Radice, with works that show a meticulous and slow process of analyzing her own body, thanks to the camera's eye and other reflective tools such as mirrors, metal objects and knives. They are works in which her woman-being is central, yet they escape an explicit definition of feminist art. Therefore, I propose to rethink the works of de Freitas taking into account this ambiguity, which underlies questions that have never been resolved. In addition to the international bibliography, but considering the absence of archival sources, a prolonged conversation with the artist has been vital, especially to focus on the radical change in her artistic practice upon returning to Brazil.