Furla Prize winner and dOCUMENTA 13 participant, Chiara Fumai (1978) lets real historical figures speak through her body as a medium. Although attitudes of feminism are immanently present in her work, it ceases to remain in any category and rather simultaneously joins fantastic with real, contemporary with passed and serious with ironic. In the frame of liberation from given time and space, Chiara Fumai will introduce in FUTURA – Centre for Contemporary Art Prague two installations more or less growing from her performances. The Criminal Woman is a video installation dedicated to Eusapia Palladino, an Italian illiterate maid who became famous worldwide at the end of the XIX century claiming to have psychic powers. Chiara Fumai Reads Valerie Solanas is a wall drawing sketching Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, the manifesto for cutting up men. The two works are separated by a selection of recent collages based on the writings of feminist activist Carla Lonzi.

The summoning*
[* Excerpt from N.H. Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, Possession and Capital. Toward a Coherent Theory of Chiara Fumai‘s Adventures, The Mandrake Press, London 1969].

[…] Forty-seven, “dead man talking”. Yes, because spirits are now able to talk: And this is the second function of this toothed vagina. But what do the spirits say? Or rather what does the woman possessed say through these spirits? In truth, nothing new, just the same old things. She reproduces their same old monologues and not a comma is changed.
She speaks already spoken words also when spoken by men: they want her to behave like a witch so she behaves like a witch. She speaks already spoken words, yet she produces variations. She raises her voice, changes the tone, changes the gestures, changes the rhythm, and with the rhythm, also the tempo changes. She spits forward all that which remains behind, undigested. She speaks already spoken words and the past is pushed into the future. She revolves time as she has revolved everything else. She is revolting, as she well knows: it doesn’t need to be repeated.

Nothing remains a dead letter. She speaks and makes even the dumb speak. But not all. She chooses the martyrs whom no-one dares to succour, the bad politicians, the bad girls, some Prometheus bound, thieves, vipers, grenades, moustached women, assassins. We didn’t even remember the birth of the Eusapia Palladinos, the Miss Annie Jones, the Meinhofs, the Solanas. But here they are, lined up along the firing line, eager to carry out the sentence.

Every possession is a war cry to which hundreds more rally: called to a battle in which everyone fights for himself. Karl Marx tried to join forces with this army of Lumpen. But while he was shouting égalité, the woman possessed had shot him. Or maybe it was Groucho? Or Andy? More than the class warfare, the woman possessed fights for her own survival. She strives for the impossible: to start a revolution with revisionism. She doesn’t ask us to change the world but to repeat a different History, to teach a lesson. So that it/she will be passed on. […]

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