Clemen Parrocchetti

Critical text

In her pioneering work, Clemen Parrocchetti (1923 2016, Milan) powerfully revolted against the patriarchal order she herself was subject to. Her art involved a call to all women to engage in a collective examination of their everyday domestic lives, while developing key tools for denunciation of systemic issues that women had experienced. In her view, such issues started at one s private home, which she decisively used as a repository of materials to critique and contest female subjugation. Parrocchetti employed needles, spools, bobbins, cooking utensils, medicaments, and textiles, and repurposed them, as if to open up them for conversation, confrontation and communication with oppressive hierarchies that enabled gender exploitation. After her training at Milan s Brera Academy of Fine Arts as a mother of five, Parrocchetti became involved with militant factions of the Italian radical left. In 1978 she attended the first national meeting of over 500 culture workers, organised by the Italian Federation of Workers in the Visual Arts, addressing the control mechanisms at play in the art system and nuancing what constitutes feminist aesthetics. In 1978, she joined the feminist Gruppo Immagine of Varese, with whom she exhibited at the Venice Biennale that year and displayed handmade protest banners along with her manifesto Memorandum for an Object of Female Culture (1973). Parrocchetti s work continues to implicate and speak to women s fights for equal pay and the right to abortion: issues that after almost half a century remain at the heart of contemporary political debate.

Text by Defne Ayas

The artist’s voice

I don t want any more sadness and tears over that red strip of blood coming from the mattress that binds us all to the repetitiveness of the thousand tasks rises: I have opened a tear of freedom and hope in a red mouth.