À JOUR. Clemen Parrocchetti

Opening December 5th, 7PM

Ar/Ge Kunst presents À JOUR, the first institutional exhibition of the work of Clemen Parrocchetti (Milan 1923–2016). A rebellious and non-conformist artist, Clemen Parrocchetti experienced the events of 1968 as a watershed moment of radical creative and political transformation. It was in those years of feminist struggle that the artist adopted the tools and methods of housework to take a political stance on the issues most hotly debated on a theoretical level within the movement, such as the subordinate role of women, abortion and divorce as elements of emancipation, domestic violence and sexual liberation.

The peculiarity of domestic chores in Parrocchetti’s works reflects the artist’s closeness to the International Feminist Collective founded in Padua by theorists such as Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Leopoldina Fortunati. Among its many political actions, the Collective instituted the International Wages for Housework Campaign. This latter theme was also central to the Varese-based Gruppo Immagine featuring women artists only (Cibaldi, Gandini, Parrocchetti, Secol and Sironi), which Parrocchetti joined in ’78 and with which she would take part in the Venice Biennale that same year.

The exhibition focuses largely on Parrocchetti’s works form the 1970s. À jour, the work which provides the title for the show, exploits the various meanings of the term in French, referencing the embroidery technique performed by extracting threads from the weft of a fabric in such a way as to create a slight transparency, also known as openwork stitching in English. Yet mettre à jour also means to make something manifest; in this case, what is brought to light is the very condition of women in their struggle against patriarchal subordination. But à jour is also used in the sense of the repetitiveness of female household chores, highlighting the barriers that the female artist must overcome day after day.

Clemen Parrocchetti (1923–2016) lived and worked in Milan. After gaining a diploma from the Brera Academy in 1957, she held more than fifty solo shows in Italy and abroad, developing original research with its own strong character, embracing the spirit of the protests of ’68 and founding a feminist language “expressed through objects”, in line with the political outlook of the revendication of the unpaid work of production and reproduction carried out by women, close to the Movement of Feminist Struggle based in Padua.