MAGMA. A revolt for us

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Moterų dailė; Feminizmas; Italija (Italy); Women's art; Feminism; Italy.

ENJulia Kristeva said that "For at least two centuries, the initially rich and complex term revolt has assumed a political significance [...] Revolt as return/turning back/displacement/ change constitutes the profound logic of a certain culture that I would like to revive here and whose acuity seems quite threatened these days". A "revolt", not in the sense of a sterile political struggle, but a radical, demanding, singular interior existence capable not only of looking back to the complexity of the past, but also focusing on today and looking towards the future. That was the spirit in which this project began in 2013, with the aim of presenting an insightful survey of feminism and art. Initially through a detailed analysis of the use of the word in art - visual poetry being an important component -, in the conviction that women, through these experiences, mapped out a horizon of civilization and carried forth a radical re-thinking of life that we have not yet fully come to terms with. And later, thanks to an exchange of ideas with my colleague Laima Kreivytė, we decided to launch a dialogue with more recent Lithuanian experiences, marked by an awareness of the long past experience of Western and Eastern European women. In Italy, the feminist movement - even before it reached its apex on the political level, with the achievement of equal rights and victories in the pro-choice and divorce struggles - provoked a radical change in the estimation of women’s social status, perceptions of their gender identity and their will to attain power, while in Lithuania, political upheavals linked to the fall of the Iron Curtain were not matched by social change and gender equality. Growing awareness of their oppressed condition and identification as active subjects was supported by the idea of gender aggregation and separatism as an indispensable method in the struggle for liberation.Those ideas pushed some women intellectuals in Lithuania and Italy to become the protagonists of the most avantgarde types of artistic experimentation. In Italy, this phase flowered in the 1960s, in violent opposition to the lingering vestiges of 19th century society as well as to the nascent mass-media society, while in Lithuania it flourished between the end of the last century and the beginning of the new millennium, in opposition to the period of Soviet occupation and repression. [...]. [Extract, p. 14-15]