To enter the digital exhibition, please chose one of the following sections, three different lexicons were chosen to highlight the subjects shared amongst the featured artists: the kins, the representations, and the struggles of feminine identities today.
A Feminine Lexicon brings together works by contemporary feminine artists in a collective exploration of the themes of language and identity, which are vital and inevitable subjects in our contemporary condition.
The project stems from a proposal by Museo Salvatore Ferragamo to invite students from Istituto Marangoni Firenze to imagine a contemporary response to Women in Balance, an exhibition that focuses on the role of women in Italy during the economic boom, seeking a difficult balance between the traditional model of femininity and a new identity in their professional and private lives.
The pressing nature of these issues, which still remains today, enabled the students to embark on a new study, parallel to the exhibition at Palazzo Spini Feroni and in synergy with it, in order to continue to observe the revolutions involving women’s identity in our present day, throught the work of 11 international contemporary artists.
Featured Artists:
(I) Monia Ben Hamouda, (II) Stacey Gillian Abe, (III) Helena Hladilová, (IV) Lebohang Kganye, (V) ChongYan Liu, (VI) Reba Maybury, (VII) Alfiah Rahdini, (VIII) Haruka Sakaguchi, (IX) Griselda San Martin, (X) Johanna Toruño, (XI) Alice Visentin.
Curated by the Arts Curating 2021-2022 course, Istituto Marangoni Firenze.
Students:
Pia Diamandis and Elena Tortelli.
Tutors:
Davide Daninos, Carolina Gestri, Francesca Giulia Tavanti and Enrico Visani.
If the eighteenth century was the Age of Reason, the nineteenth the era of revolutions, and the twentieth, the short lasting century, was the age of extremes, then the early twenty-first is still characterized by the revolutions that began at the end of the past century. The end of the Cold War and the invention of the Internet exponentially increased opportunities for encounters outside geographical, social, and family boundaries. This, by means of a global dialog, has accelerated the emergence of an increasing number of “brand new forms of being” as written by Luigina Mortari, and ways in which these are shared.
This age of identity coincides with the actual age of the project curators, Pia Diamandis and Elena Tortelli, who were born between 1999 and 2000. As they are now begining to construct their own critical gaze, they chose without hesitation the role of language as the key theme in creating and forging identity. And now, in this new decade that has just begun, not even the various periods of isolation and restrictions on our contacts have halted this nourishing and transformational dialog. In fact, quite the opposite. The continual hum of our conversations—digital and mediated—has now come to saturate the very air that we breathe, obscuring and extending the horizon of the ego beyond its traditional boundaries. Not by chance, A Feminine Lexicon is the result of a dialog between international women artists and curators, conducted via the Internet. The aim of the project, which was immediately agreed on together with the Museo Salvatore Ferragamo, was involving feminine artists from different backgrounds and cultures, expanding the geographical boundaries in order to offer a broad-ranging vision regarding the issues raised in the Women in Balance exhibition. These include the family, the image of women in the media, conflicts between public and private life, gender relations, sexuality, and the dialog between different generations.
By bringing together different identities and individual stories within the same curatorial setting, an attempt has been made to create a transnational lexicon that is heterogeneous and incomplete, but able to home in on multiple aspects of contemporary women’s identities.
The digital exhibition is developed through various sections, three different lexicons chosen to highlight three subjects shared amongst the featured artists: the kins, the representations, and the struggles of feminine identities today.
Three Sections: Three Lexicons
Featured Artists
Partner
Istituto Marangoni Firenze is a School of Fashion & Art, situated on distinguished Via de’ Tornabuoni, where history, art, and luxury are found. In addition to a variety of both undergraduate and postgraduate level courses covering all areas of fashion, business, and styling, and programmes in Art History & Culture, Art Management, Multimedia Arts, the School also offers an array of intensive and accredited programmes such as Luxury Accessories Design and Shoe Design. Since October 2021, it has been launched I’M Firenze Digest, the digital journal and exhibition space of Istituto Marangoni Firenze students: https://imfirenzedigest.com/.
A Feminine Lexicon has been created by the Arts Curating students, coordinated by Tutors Davide Daninos, Carolina Gestri, Francesca Giulia Tavanti ed Enrico Visani.
Curators
Pia Diamandis (Jakarta, Indonesia, 1999) is a writer, researcher and curator of horror films and contemporary art. She is currently finishing her curatorial studies at Istituto Marangoni Firenze while working as an assistant to international filmmaker Timo Tjahjanto. Diamandis writes frequently for online media such as Tirto.id, and is part of the Broadly Specific collective, which she participates in through essays and podcasts.
Elena Tortelli (Prato, Italy, 2000) is an art curator and writer. In 2019 she started her university path at Istituto Marangoni Firenze attending the three-year Arts Curating course, which will end in July 2022. In 2022 she participated in The School to be done workshop, organized by MACRO and Castro, Rome.