Brigantinas by Nicola Lo Calzo at Museo Nivola

The Nivola Museum is pleased to present the exhibition of Brigantinas, a winning project of Strategia Fotografia 2023 call for proposals promoted by the General Directorate of Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

Overview

With more than thirty previously unseen works made in the territory, the project curated by Elisa Medde and Giangavino Pazzola investigates the issue of subalternity at the intersection of gender, class and colonial positioning of struggles for land in Sardinia, questioning the ways in which certain events and dynamics influenced the formation of contemporary Sardinian subjectivities and identity.

Beginning with a study of episodes inherent in local resistance to colonial phenomena and territorial subjugation, and of the female figures that such events animated, Brigantinas highlights the persistence of tensions created by power relations imposed on internal communities that retain a close link to modern-day land and landscape issues.

Through never-before-seen images and archival materials from various sources (including the State Archives of Nuoro and the Museum of Banditry in Aggius), the exhibition provides a discussion ground for the search for new visual paradigms for understanding subalternity in the contemporary world. Added to these is a video featuring the performance - by actress and author Vittoria Marras - of Paska Zau, the protagonist of the popular revolt of Su Connottu against the laws that abolished the communal use of land (1868).

Several authors, including Bachisio Bandinu, argue that “language is the testimony of a transformative path in the life and culture of a people, within the social experience of the historical-political, economic and cultural condition.”

The Brigantinas project is situated in this perspective. Through a large wall installation, the exhibition develops a symbolic reasoning on the registers of collective representation, of the image as a language for the construction of the self, juxtaposing photographs of “delinquent” women resulting from the anthropological records of the mid-twentieth century with photographic portraits of contemporary women. The alternation between declared identities of activists and others of young women dressed in traditional dress takes on the sense of a symbolic gesture that underscores the tensions between power and resistance.

Constructing a counter-narrative that frames the boundary between illegal activity in the eyes of power and political struggle, between deviance and resistance, images of religious and civic processions, rituals and the everyday life of communities are offered as a ground for analyzing the coexistence and clash between dominance and subalternity in identity-building processes.

The exhibition will be followed by the publication of a volume in collaboration with L'Artiere Edizioni, while a study day on the theme of the representation of identities and its political and social implications between the internal and external gaze will be organized to complete the project.