Citation, Annotation,Translation: Reflections on Italian Feminisms and the Now You Can Go programme

This lecture focuses on ‘Now You Can Go,’ a two-week long events programme inspired by Italian feminisms of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that Helena Reckitt initiated and organised with six feminist colleagues in 2015. Foregrounding the implications of what it means to both curate as feminists and to curate feminist content, the talk explores how practices of transmission, translation and annotation operate as means of intergenerational feminist encounter.

Italian feminisms feature little within Anglo-American accounts of the women’s movement. Yet the tactics that Italian feminists developed, largely through the practices of small groups and collectives, have much to offer contemporary feminism. These practices include autocosziena, the Italian feminist version of consciousness-raising; affidamento/entrustment, in which women form relationships of entrustment with one another that recognise their differences and disparities; non-assimilationist politics that refuse the assumptions inherent to campaigns for equal rights; and the rejection of expected roles and institutional power that Carla Lonzi termed ‘deculturation,’ which she examined in her book Vai Pure, whose English name, ‘Now You Can Go,’ lent the programme its title.

Reckitt describes how the ‘Now You Can Go’ programme developed out of the Feminist Duration Reading Group on under-known feminisms, especially those from Italy, and discusses how programme elements were led by the seven members of a programming team that she initiated. Considering the generative impact of the programme, Reckitt also discusses some of its limitations, which reflect the need to incorporate feminist values into a project that curates feminist content.

The talk considers the practices of artists, theorists and activists including the historical projects of Carla Lonzi, Rivolta Femminile, Milan Women’s Bookshop Collective, Wages For Housework, Teresa de Lauretis, and Gayatri Spivak, and of contemporary practitioners including Claire Fontaine, Kajsa Dahlberg, Laura Guy, Gabrielle Moser, and Nina Wakeford.

Following the presentation, Reckitt later participated in a panel discussion alongside curators and art historians Nkule Mabaso, Lara Perry, Maura Reilly, Dorothee Richter, and Hilary Robinson, chaired by Laura Castagnini.