IL TEMPO DELLE DONNE: Patrizia Benedetta Fratus – AGO, FILO E LIBERTÀ
“Il Tempo delle Donne“, the Corriere della Sera and “La27esimaOra” festival-festival, organised in collaboration with Triennale Milano and Valore D., will be held at the Milan Triennale from 8 to 10 September 2023, now in its 10th edition and offering a packed programme of events.
This year’s keyword is freedom: of thought, of expression, of bodies, of the press, of choice, of love, a word that encompasses all the other themes tackled over the past ten years.
Three days of live enquiries, conversations, performances, workshops and meetings with important Italian and international guests from the cultural, artistic, scientific and literary scene, to discover all the declinations of freedom and understand how important it is today.
Among the events is Patrizia Benedetta Fratus’s participatory art installation – AGO, FILO E LIBERTÀ curated by Barbara Pavan.
The cycle of works on show is a synthesis of the last ten years of Patrizia Fratus’ participatory art. “Freedom is participation” sang Giorgio Gaber, and these two elements are the key to understanding the artist’s entire research, for which artistic practice becomes the medium, the possibility of realising the former through the latter, starting first of all by freeing oneself from the idea of oneself that one has sewn onto oneself. Hers is a path nourished by the prospect that one day we will all be able to participate in freedom and that this process may also start from the conquest of the conscious gesture that, as an action, removes us from passivity, transforms us from object into subject, allows us to regain possession of the authenticity of our existence instead of suffering a representation that does not belong to us. Only in a dimension that is not only individual but necessarily plural and collective, moreover, is freedom possible, since we will never be free surrounded by cages.
The canvases that make up this exhibition itinerary evoke, for Fratus, the walls of our caves: on them the needle, one stitch after another, has fixed the trace of a multiplicity of shared personal narratives, stories of freedom written together, bearing witness to the fact that each person can become the author and protagonist of his or her own work, each one in adhering to a project of participatory art becoming aware that the impossible is achievable from the moment one begins to imagine that it is. The space of the work is therefore a territory of encounter, of exchange, of comparison: the relationship itself is here an expressive medium and as such liberating of the essence of the individual, capable of broadening horizons and multiplying the tools for exploring beyond the perimeter of existence that we (re)know.
