Francesca Lolli at Art City

From 31 January to 4 February 2024, as part of Art City Bologna 2024, the Carlo Gajani Foundation presents the exhibition “Come tu mi vuoi” by Francesca Lolli and curated by Sara Papini in its spaces.

The project, Come tu mi vuoi, is an ongoing photographic work begun in 2021, composed of a series of self-portraits by the artist aimed at investigating gender stereotypes.

The photos, exhibited within the foundation’s spaces, will be placed in dialogue with the artist Gajani’s home and works, through a relationship at a distance in time and space between the two in a game of intergenerational references.

“In this familiar place, I would like to play with my presence-absence by exhibiting the photographic series on gender stereotypes, Come tu mi vuoi, camouflaging it with the surrounding environment,” explains Francesca Lolli. “Within my research, mostly made up of video art and video performance, photography arises as an opportunity to experiment with some of the themes that are dear to me, such as gender and the socio-political issues related to it. The investigation, takes place through an expressive medium that is still unfamiliar to me but necessary, at this time, to investigate the various stereotypical masks of human beings, mainly women in this case, due to socio-cultural preconceptions and superstructures.”

In addition to the photographic part, therefore, the artist will carry out further site-specific interventions inside the foundation, bringing the spectator and viewer to interact in the first person with the environment and the works, in a true “hunt for the work”. Understanding where Francesca Lolli will have made changes within the space of the foundation may sometimes be evident but often difficult if not impossible.

A moment, therefore, that is artistic but above all political. “The personal is political” said the feminists of the 1960s and Francesca Lolli’s work clearly demonstrates this.

As curator Sara Papini specifies: “Women have always been relegated to positions of inferiority with respect to men, especially in the western world. Associated with sexist and gender stereotypes, she has had to struggle to assert herself as a social being since the 19th century. No longer an object, as Irigaray would say, nor even a subject as De Beauvoir would point out. To this day, despite the great feminist groups that animated the European and Italian scene in the 1960s and 1970s, certain problems persist, as shown by the statistics of ISTAT every year. Women are still the ones who lose their jobs the fastest, they almost never make it to the top of companies, they are often forced to accept part-time jobs in order to take care of children and family, and they are still strongly sexualised. The woman’s body, as Lorella Zanardo has repeatedly emphasised, is still an object body, a devalued and commodified body, or as Emanuela Abbatecola would say in her latest essay published by Feltrinelli, Donna Faber, sexualised. All this and more emerges in Francesca Lolli’s work”.

(from the press release)