Tomaso Binga

1931 | Salerno, Italy
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Tomaso Binga — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

Courtesy Tomaso Binga and Galleria Tiziana Di Caro

Sponsor
— Galleria Tiziana Di Caro

Italian artist and writer.

Tomaso Binga (who was married to the art critic Filiberto Menna) explained that she chose a male pseudonym in order to parody the cultural privileges reserved for men. This ploy to discredit the art world, passing by way of a disguised sexual identity (a theme which occurs throughout her work), started with a demystification of the difference between the sexes in writing and language. She lives in Rome, where, since 1970, she has carried on her tireless activity involving the organization of avant-garde events with performances, collages, video and sonic poetry works, and painting, involving nothing less than a contamination of codes—writing, gestures, bodies, signs, sounds and images—, very frequently pushed to the limits of  meaninglessness, as, for example, in E non uscire di casa [And don’t leave the house](1977), Abecedario (1981), Indovina cos’è [Guess what it is] (1987), Rimerotiche [Erotic rhymes] (1992) and Vorrei essere un vigile urbano [I’d like to be a traffic policeman].

Like nothing less than a midwife of images, Binga displays a provocative spirit and unusual opinions, but in order to understand her very varied method of invention, both playful and committed, we must refer not so much to a repetition of futurist tests, as to the anti-sexist themes of the difference between the sexes, psychoanalysis applied to language, and oedipal archetypes. In her countless works and performances, what is invariably involved is a happy sexual liberation of words, with the help of refrains, stereotypes, riddles and a material dissemination of signs.

Enza Biagini

Translated from French by Simon Pleasance.

From the Dictionnaire universel des créatrices
© 2013 Des femmes – Antoinette Fouque
© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions
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