An encounter with Sisi

Sissi’s Daniela ha perso il treno, which dates to 1999, at MAMBo, Bologna

We spent the Easter weekend in Bologna, a continuation of our commitment to explore Italian towns and cities. This time I was enthused about having passed the A2 level two-language test. Just having that validation has made me feel less nervous and angst-ridden about speaking the language. Many Italians shift to English when they notice your discomfort, but I've been enjoying the challenge of sustaining the conversation in this faulty tongue. I can now order at a restaurant, understand the announcements at train stations and even ask for directions or give directions if necessary. I'm still working my way through the sentence constructions and frequently make many mistakes. But I'm finally having fun with Italian and feel this eagerness to continue and a desire to master all the many different tenses the language boasts.

We picked Bologna because it was on our list and we had two days and nights to explore. But it's really such an outdoor city, with all its porticoes, that our trip felt relaxed. On the first day, our child decided to take a fairly long nap and I thought we had to seize the opportunity to do something we wouldn't otherwise we able to do as smoothly if he were awake. So, we made our way to the museum for modern and contemporary art, cutely abbreviated to MAMBo. I have been ‘studying' Italian art institutions since 2018, learning more about strategies of display, noting down instances that attest to the existence of curatorial intelligence in framing the exhibitions and the many moments when there seems to be none, or the curatorial consciousness is discernibly right-wing fascist. I hesitate to use the word fascist, but it is so uniquely and irrevocably tied to modern and contemporary Italian history and politics. One can see, if one looks, how the absence of any form of collective reckoning with Italy's complicity with fascism has left too much room for its ideologies to continue to perpetuate. There have been myths constructed about how Italians suffered under fascism, but little is written about how they also actively endorsed its rise. A scenario like this explains why one would find a sculptural work titled ‘Head of Mussolini' unironically on display. Were it Hitler's head, there would have been hell to pay.

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MAMBo was surprisingly delightful and felt not too heavy-footed. The displays weren't ingenious or didn't only feature big-ticket names and even included some female artists. One artwork really stood out for me. It was a two-part display dating to 1999. On the floor, next to a Television, was a sculptural installation that looked like a ginormous skirt, resembling, in pattern, something someone from the Victorian era might have worn. Except, the garment was constructed out of what seemed like rubber placentas. It was clearly meant to be activated by air. The accompanying video documented a performance that was undertaken by an artist as part of a project called ‘Accademia in Stazione', which was a kind of public art project linked with the Academy of Fine Arts, Bologna, and curated by Mili Romano and Roberto Daolio to mark the 20th anniversary of the horrific attack on the station in 1980. The work is poetically titled, ‘Daniela ha perso il treno' [Daniela missed the train]. In the video, the artist, Daniela Olivieri is seen on a platform at the Bologna Centrale station collecting the many layers of her inflatable placental skirt as soon as she sees the train approaching. She is consumed by her motive of getting onto the train by all means necessary, except the inflated placental skirt won't quite make it through the narrow passage. She continues to try, making numerous attempts in the span during which the train has come to a halt but is unsuccessful. Inevitably, she misses the train.

Apparently, it was during or after this performance that the artist adopted the pseudonym Sissi, which continues to be her art world name. She continues to make sculptural pieces that are hand-knitted or woven, like this skirt, and works that are rooted in the body. I haven't seen other works by her, but this work felt like a poem that was written for me. I felt ‘seen' by it. I have been thinking so much about time and lateness and what it means to not have the opportunities to arrive at ideas in a timely way, to have them reach you later. I have also, in my own writing, been exploring how the body's own evolution alters one's inhabitation of time, thus altering subjectivity. This work had a pathos about it. A sense of knowing from the get-go that one will be defeated by weight, by gravity, by the colossal nature of one's own undertaking, and yet a daring audacity to persist nonetheless. It is Sisyphean in that sense, and yet, like Albert Camus wrote, ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy'.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx

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