De-linking Women and Nature: Care Work as a Subject of Art at the 1978 Venice Biennale

In the renowned comedy Vacanze intelligenti, directed by Alberto Sordi as part of the 1978 film trilogy Dove vai in vacanza?, fruit vendors Remo and Augusta Proietti, played by Sordi himself and Anna Longhi, venture to the Venice Biennale.^[1] Their unexpected educational vacation is at the behest of their children, who have developed aspirations of moving up the social ladder during their studies. The couple, representing the Roman lower middle class, appears conspicuously out of place at the Venice Biennale. As is often the case with Sordi, whose characters were instrumental in shaping the figure of the average Italian, the protagonists’ efforts to conform to an imposed model of behavior are destined for failure.^[2] In a roughly ten-minute sequence that humorously depicts their visit, however, the exhibition’s thematic focus – From Nature to Art, from Art to Nature – poses a challenge not only for Remo and Augusta. The ostentatious tour guide alone seems able to grasp the boundaries and the intentions of art that engages with nature. As Augusta rests on a chair beneath a potted palm tree in Marcel Broodthaers’ work, an art collector promptly contemplates purchasing the lifelike installation for a hefty sum (fig. 1). The film’s humor arises from a widely relatable discomfort with contemporary art, formulating a critique of the disparity between Italian society and the realm of art and culture. Moreover, Christian Democrat Sordi might have been particularly eager to target the Biennale, which, under President Carlo Ripa di Meana, had taken on socialist leanings.^[3]

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Scene from Alberto Sordi’s film Le vacanze intelligenti, 1978: Augusta falls asleep in Marcel Broodthaers’ installation at the 1978 Venice Biennale

Interestingly, although this was not the film’s intention, Vacanze intelligenti sheds light on a significant aspect relevant to our subject. It highlights the Biennale’s official disregard for the historically gendered implications of both concepts – art and nature – crucial to the survey’s theme, despite the momentum of second-wave feminism at the time. Approaching the central pavilion of the Giardini, in the outdoor area the couple encounters Mimmo Conenna’s installation Megacono (1978; figs. 2, 3), consisting of twenty-five metal sculptures resembling oversized funnels, some stacked to create a tower. Augusta shows a curiosity about the objects, asking what they are. Remo responds by identifying them as funnels. She quickly relates them to her routine household tasks, mentioning how she arranges funnels in a similar way when cleaning the kitchen. However, her husband promptly rejects the comparison, reminding her that they are at the Biennale and it is, in fact, a sculpture.^[4] Merging art with domestic work, as his wife has suggested, is inconceivable within the exhibition context; this seems clear even to a fruit vendor. The crucial point, indeed, is the distance between Conenna’s work and household chores, despite its formal artistic references. According to art historian and co-curator of the Italian section Enrico Crispolti’s presentation in the exhibition catalog, Conenna engages in a continuous interplay “between the ‘cultivated’ culture of the ‘neo-avant-gardes’ and the popular culture of his native Apulia.”^[5] This engagement is marked by a complete acceptance, albeit with a wry detachment, “of circumstances typical of his own cultural and social territory.”^[6] Crispolti’s observations relegate domestic work outside the realm of art and categorize it as “nature occupied.”^[7] In this light, household tasks may have sparked inspiration for the artist, but they needed to be recontextualized within the parameters of the neo-avant-gardes to warrant inclusion in the exhibition. Making a divide between art and care work while categorizing the latter as part of nature obliquely reinforced the historical linkage of art and masculinity, and nature and femininity. By defining art through its “cultivated” distinction from nature – which the fictional housewife in Sordi’s film finds challenging to grasp – the Biennale team cemented a longstanding symbolic hierarchy, evading any discussion of its gender-related associations. This essay revisits the 1978 Venice Biennale, aiming to dissect the connotations of art and nature resonating in the exhibition’s narrative. In the context of second-wave feminism, these concepts were pitted against the Biennale’s official discourse through collateral shows, self-organized by the feminist collectives Gruppo Femminista Immagine from Varese and Donne/Immagine/Creatività from Naples. Guided by a Marxist viewpoint, both exhibitions, I will contend, mobilized reproductive labor to challenge and deconstruct established notions of an intrinsic link between women and nature.

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Mimmo Conenna, Megacono, 1978. From the 1978 Venice Biennale catalog

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Scene from Alberto Sordi’s film Le vacanze intelligenti, 1978: Remo and Augusta discuss Mimmo Conenna’s work Megacono at the 1978 Venice Biennale

At the heart of the Biennale was the historical-thematic exhibition in the central pavilion, curated by Jean-Christophe Ammann, Achille Bonito Oliva, Antonio del Guercio, and Filiberto Menna (fig. 4). Their survey reinterpreted the Biennale’s overarching theme as Six Stations for Art-Nature. The Nature of Art. In sections entitled Great Abstraction / Great Realism, Window / Interior, The Urban Iconosphere, The Convention of Vision, The Entropy of Art, and Nature / Anti-Nature, the curators showcased a development of Western modern and contemporary art.^[8] Over 120 artist positions, among which Carla Accardi, Alice Aycock, Agnes Denes, and Agnes Martin stood out as the only female-read exceptions, were arranged into both diachronic and synchronic constellations. Guiding the curators was the idea “that modern art […] presents coherent sign systems that replace the sign system of tradition based on the linguistic codification of the Renaissance. Modern art has opened to question, above all, the principle of correspondence contained within the traditional system, and it has been concerned with […] avoiding any reference to an uncritical correspondence between language and reality. Before reflecting the world, the artist is led to thinking about himself, to an examination of his capacity and of his methods.”^[9] The curatorial narrative of liberating art from its imitative role as recapitulated here revived, although through a semiotic language, a fundamental trope in Italian art history – that of an “intellectualist creation principle.”^[10] This concept was introduced by Giorgio Vasari in his Vite as the pinnacle of post-medieval painting. Vasari divided his developmental history into three stages (età). In the initial phase, artists – above all, Giotto – strove to replicate nature. In the second phase, artists progressively moved towards an exact depiction of nature, which culminated in the third stage, exemplified by Leonardo, until Michelangelo eventually surpassed the representation of nature by elevating nature beyond its role as a model.

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From Nature to Art, from Art to Nature: Overview of exhibition sections in the 1978 Venice Biennale catalog

Vasari’s idea that perfect art is molded by the artistic spirit, thus forming a new nature of its own, resonated strongly in the discourse of Ammann, Bonito Oliva, del Guercio, and Menna with respect to modern and contemporary art.^[11] In pursuing this line of thought, the curators implicitly reinvigorated the duality and hierarchy of spirit and matter, culture and nature, and therefore the defining traits of Western intellectual history since ancient times. As far back as the days of philosophers Plato and Aristotle this thought pattern was intertwined with gender implications, where the ethereal was seen as “masculine” and the innate as “feminine.”^[12] Be it Mother Earth, Terra Mater, or Gaia, what connects these different terms is the assumption that nature was predominantly perceived as feminine. Women were considered the “naturally” weaker gender, with their capability for childbirth seen as a natural life objective.^[13] This gendered classification also laid the groundwork for a persistent establishment of gender distinctions within the realm of art. It was not only that the female artists discussed by Vasari, according to his narrative, were unable to surpass the category of imitation of nature – beyond this, their mimetic abilities were attributed to female reproductive capacity, that is, to a symbiotic relation to nature.^[14] That the curatorial team of the Biennale chose to illustrate its narrative of an artistic intellect overcoming nature by means of a great majority of male-read positions was an implicit corroboration of this traditionally masculine coding of creatorship and art.

Even beyond the thematic exhibition, the Biennale further encouraged this discourse. Works that incorporated living beings in the Italian and Israeli pavilions tangibly showcased the artist’s authority over nature. During the opening, Antonio Paradiso attracted attention with his piece Bull and Mechanical Cow, in which he had a live bull mount a fake cow, thus orchestrating a simulated reproductive process (fig. 5). Conversely, both inside and outside the Israeli pavilion, Menashe Kadishman presented a group of 18 live sheep, their fur previously marked with blue paint, crowded into a straw-filled fenced enclosure (fig. 6). While Crispolti in the catalog positioned Paradiso’s piece within the framework of an “ancestral agrarian culture in Apulia” and construed it as an ode to “archaic and secret vitality that is not reducible to mechanical, rationalistic control,”^[15] Sheep was concurrently depicted as a “demonstrative rather than […] descriptive” artwork that emerged from Kadishman’s personal experience as a shepherd in a kibbutz in the Yzreel Valley.^[16] The artistic quality of his moving “blue-painted stains” was seen as rooted in the “freedom” that set the creative approach apart from the “constraint” of natural behavior.^[17] Both artworks subordinated living beings to artistic self-expression. We could further argue that an inherent aspect of these works was the specific subjugation of the female-read element – whether it is the fake cow or the sheep – achieved through the application of ejaculate or splashes of paint, respectively. These operations additionally strengthened the link between artistry and virility. Insofar as the Biennale foregrounded not the reproductive but the productive stance of art towards nature, its concept and focus were, although tacitly, far from gender neutral. The traditional image of the artist as a male intellectual figure who exerts control over a feminized nature and transforms it into an object of his creative imagination could not, however, simply be transferred to or appropriated by women artists. This became evident during the 1970s in feminist debates on the theme of “female creativity” – which, as we shall see, eventually entered the Biennale through the back door, subjecting the survey to substantial criticism.

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Antonio Paradiso, Bull and mechanical cow, 1978. From the 1978 Venice Biennale catalog

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Menashe Kadishman, Sheep, 1978. From the 1978 Venice Biennale catalog

Modes of Inclusion

Besides those women artists or art practitioners seeking to infiltrate the profoundly unbalanced art field in 1970s Italy by conforming to its pre-existing modes, structures, and professional conventions, radical feminists employed a critical stance towards assimilation.^[18] The Italian term uguaglianza encompasses both sameness and equality, and it was the aspect of sameness that most radical feminists disallowed, setting female subjectivity, freed from male norms, as the essential prerequisite for any social transformation instead.^[19] Their critical stance manifested in at least three strategies, variously employed by artists involved in feminism. The first strategy, absence, was most famously embodied by art critic Carla Lonzi, who, in 1969, abruptly withdrew from her profession as an art critic to devote herself entirely to feminism, with the subsequent founding of the influential collective Rivolta Femminile (“Female Revolt”) in 1970 together with artist Carla Accardi and journalist Elvira Banotti.^[20] Programmatic withdrawal was the subject of the renowned 1971 essay authored by the collective, republished in a shorter English version under the title “On Women’s Refusal to Celebrate Male Creativity” by the US-based feminist journal Heresies in 1977.^[21] A second strategy was the conceptualization of an alternative aesthetics, reflecting the specificity of women’s experiences, be they determined by nature or nurture. Aware of parallel developments in the US while reporting on the art scene in New York in the journal Data, art critic Anne Marie Sauzeau Boetti introduced the concept of altra creatività, by which she endeavored to discern “female” features in the oeuvre of women artists past and present to differentiate a universalizing idea of creativity. She called for a distinction between male and female creativity based not on biological determinism but on the lived experience of the respective gender: “Whether it be visual language or writing,” Sauzeau Boetti maintained, “feminine expression will be the ‘other thing,’ outside the linguistic system that has reordered reality according to the male experience.”^[22] A third strategy consisted in acknowledging the polyvalent creativity inherent to women’s lives. In the context of a leftist strand of radical feminism that applied Marxist categories to the social condition of women, ways of complying with female social roles were recast as intrinsically creative beyond the established realm of fine arts. “We are continually artists,” noted musician and militant Laura Morato in a speech draft in 1978, “and the works of art we produce are mostly ourselves: our appearance, our way of speaking, of smiling. […] This sort of artistic versatility has at least partially protected us from the fragmentation of our various creative abilities: we have always transcended, as professionals, some fundamental divisions among the various arts!! […] And our ‘great absence’ from the history of the arts is due to the fact that our art is mass-produced.”^[23]

Acknowledging the houseworker’s creativity was an integral part of a substantial reevaluation of care as labor that took place within the Marxist-feminist camp from the early 1970s.^[24] Operating under the banner of compensation, an initiative led by activists Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Leopoldina Fortunati, Silvia Federici, and others emerged from, and as a counterpoint to, the extra-parliamentary leftist group Potere Operaio.^[25] By 1972, this effort had gained prominence as the International Wages for Housework Campaign or IWFHC. Its primary objective was to advocate for the acknowledgment and remuneration of reproductive activities as work, vital for the functioning of capitalism, while simultaneously formulating assertive strategies of resistance. The collective rejection of systemically relevant domestic work, the initiative expected, would be more effective than factory strikes in halting capitalist accumulation. Since 1973, moreover, the Griff or Gruppo di ricerca sulla famiglia e la condizione femminile (“Research group on family and the female condition”) at the University of Milan had been investigating women’s relation to work. Its director, sociologist Laura Balbo, studied the reproductive and productive commitment that women have been expected to make since their entry into the labor market under the concept of doppia presenza (“dual presence”) disseminated in 1978.^[26]

The reinterpretation of care as work denounced the fact that reproduction had been attributed to women qua nature and deemed an expression of love. In unprecedented ways, Marxist feminists deprived a female-coded sphere of activity of the natural character with which it had been historically invested, that is, they de-naturalized the relationship between women, the reproduction of life, and the maternal function.

An engagement with the houseworker’s creativity, which critically acknowledged its historical rather than natural dimension, was central to the program of two artist collectives who made their way into the 1978 Biennale, the Gruppo Femminista Immagine from Varese and the Gruppo Donne/Immagine/Creatività from Naples. Both of them contributed an individual perspective on the survey’s theme, From Nature to Art, from Art to Nature, scrutinizing what they perceived as its gendered dimensions. From 16 to 18 December 1977, the conference Verifiche di un quadrennio – riflessioni per il futuro (“Assessment of a quadrennium – reflections for the future”) was held as a prelude to the Biennale. During this event, four women – Federica Di Castro, Lia Secci, Annamaria Sorteni, and Riccarda Pagnozzato – suggested including artists that were directly linked to the feminist movement, as the omissions in this regard had become glaringly evident amidst the wide popularization of feminist concerns.^[27] As a result, the Biennale management set up the Spazio Aperto (“Open Space”) in the former salt warehouses at the Zattere to host collateral initiatives. Between 15 July and 3 September 1978, this area was taken over by the aforementioned collectives. The Gruppo Femminista Immagine reached out directly to President Carlo Ripa di Meana. Following its proactive inclusion, the Varese collective further requested the Biennale’s formal invitation for the Naples group. Eventually, they ended up co-occupying the space with two self-organized exhibitions, respectively bearing the cumbersome titles From the Creativity of the Woman as Maternity-Nature to the Control Research of Nature and From Woman to Woman Passing through the Sky (fig. 7).^[28]

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From Nature to Art, from Art to Nature: Entrance to the Open Space at the Zattere

From 20 September to 15 October 1978, following a last-minute invitation by Ripa di Meana, on the same premises artist Mirella Bentivoglio curated the exhibition Materialization of Language, featuring visual and concrete poetry by 80 modern and contemporary women artists from 18 different countries worldwide alongside selected artefacts by unknown women practitioners.^[29] Outside the primary Biennale locations and within compressed time slots, these all-women exhibitions were put together with a small budget and in an unusually short time, using recycled or self-produced displays. Incorporated into the institutional structure under visibly unequal conditions, their public resonance remained rather limited at the time. In hindsight, though, it appears that in the field of tension between the Open Space and the Biennale, a significant reevaluation of the gender-related interpretation of art, nature, and care took place.

Through their participation in the Biennale, the women artists showcased at the Open Space clearly agreed on rejecting a feminist strategy of withdrawal. However, the stance of the Varese and Naples collectives conflicted with that of Bentivoglio. In her annual surveys of the verbo-visual field, which included Materialization of Language, throughout the 1970s Bentivoglio harnessed the potential of all-women shows to give public exposure to women artists, and to distinguish women’s art from that of men.^[30] While Bentivoglio believed that creativity transcended gender, she also assumed that the historical exclusion from the male-defined domain of logos had inevitably influenced the work of women artists.^[31] Adhering to a strategic essentialism reminiscent of Sauzeau Boetti’s position, Bentivoglio sought to identify a “female” aesthetics in the verbo-visual field, achieved through techniques of desemantification, which involved stripping words of their conventional meanings. To her, this process of separating the signifiers from their signifieds gave rise to an unbounded, materially and bodily grounded approach to language representing women’s difference with respect to male-dominated culture. In contrast to Bentivoglio’s exploration of the unique interaction between women and language, framed as mater/materia and logos, respectively, the efforts of the Varese and Naples collectives aimed to disrupt the link between women and nature entirely. They did so by adopting a concept of creativity rooted in housework, while considering it merely as an interim phase leading towards a more substantial cultural transformation.

Towards a Control of Nature

Although they shared, besides the exhibition space, a similar critical take on the Biennale theme, the Varese and Naples collectives each developed an individual contribution which drew upon and augmented their previous work. Specific to the Gruppo Femminista Immagine from Varese, formed by Silvia Cibaldi, Milli Gandini, Clemen Parrocchetti, Mariuccia Secol, Maria Grazia Sironi, and Mirella Tognola, was a Marxist approach, cultivated through an active participation in the International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWFHC). Established in 1974 by artists Gandini and Secol, along with Secol’s daughter Tognola, the collective initially aligned with the political objectives of the IWFHC.^[32] This engagement manifested through agitprop-art and contributions to the campaign’s Italian publication, Le operaie della casa (“The female house workers”). Consequently, the collective’s artistic practice drew inspiration from elements and materials associated with their lives as housewives. In hindsight, Sironi recollected, “[c]onsciousness-raising had enabled us to gain mental clarity. Our materials were those that reflected our lived experiences.”^[33] However, these materials were deliberately employed to challenge and reject the notion of housework. For her 1975 exhibition titled La mamma è uscita (“Mom has gone out”) at the feminist center La Maddalena in Rome, Gandini showcased kitchen colanders with faux holes, pots covered with paint and secured by metal wire, tapestries featuring boldly raw cross-stitch work, and photographs capturing the artist drawing feminist symbols in the dust on a bookshelf or writing the word salario (“salary”) on a glass door using lipstick (fig. 8). Literally, Gandini framed the exhibits as “objects of refusal of domestic labor,” and as “testimony against such labor for its definitive destruction.”^[34] By January 1978, after having programmatically operated in activist contexts peripheral to the art field, the collective marked a shift in their approach. In the coauthored text titled Vogliamo, vo(g)liamo (“We want, we want [to fly]”), the women envisaged an individualized notion of artistic practice within the institutional framework of the art field as an essential intermediate phase toward achieving liberation.^[35] Nevertheless, their de-naturalizing take on women’s reproductive tasks remained a crucial theme of their artistic practice.

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Milli Gandini, La mamma è uscita, 1975. Installation view, 2023, exhibition Kochen, Putzen, Sorgen: Care-Arbeit in der Kunst seit 1960, Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop

The younger Neapolitan collective Donne/Immagine/Creatività, which at the time of the Venice Biennale included Valeria Dioguardi, Rosa Panaro, Bruna Sarno, and Anna Trapani, emerged from the previous Gruppo XX.^[36] With their programmatic exhibition La donna ha la testa troppo piccola per l’intelletto ma sufficiente per l’amore (“The woman has a head too small for intellect but sufficient for love”) at Lucio Amelio’s Modern Art Agency in Naples in 1977, this group had publicly challenged biologistic stereotypes. Gruppo XX’s focus on “how women experience their profession and how they approach their work, […] that is, how they are received within the male-dominated organization of ‘material’ production” remained a central concern for the new Donne/Immagine/Creatività formation.^[37] What distinguished this collective was their participatory artistic approach, intentionally drawing from the relational, informal, and craft aspects of women’s domestic work. This was in contrast with the “sphere of the aesthetic,” which they saw as a realm of “male narcissistic gratification,” and with divisive market practices.^[38] By involving socially marginalized women from diverse generations and backgrounds, the group aimed to collectively dismantle gender expectations.

At the Biennale’s Open Space, Gruppo Donne/Immagine/Creatività showcased a site-specific sculptural installation titled From Woman to Woman Passing through the Sky alongside documentation of three projects. Photographs, texts, and drawings referencing the group’s endeavors were displayed on panels forming a circle around the installation, which took center stage. Visitors learned that in the group’s first action of June 1977, Pandora’s Box, the collective engaged housewives, domestic workers, and young girls from Rione La Zabatta in San Giuseppe Vesuviano to identify the world’s woes and collect them in a handmade papier-mâché jar. This jar was then symbolically transported “to Olympus” using a rope and pulley, carrying all notes except hope, accompanied by a choir.^[39] The communal rewriting of Hesiod’s mythical tale of Pandora’s ominous box was meant to allow for the re-experiencing and re-determination of the participants as “Pandoras in the positive.”^[40] Proletarian women’s participation continued with the second action, Black Work and/or Creative Work. Undocumented domestic workers from the I. S. E. S. district in the Neapolitan suburb of Secondigliano were invited to temporarily set aside their housework tasks and instead collaborate with the artist collective on creative work. They employed materials that were integral to their daily chores, such as gloves, needles, and thread. Lastly, the third action, Male Landscape and Male Landscape, centered on collectively deciphering male interventions (“concrete signs”) within the urban landscape.^[41] Photographs depict the artists exposing root systems in green areas of the city, an undertaking they sloganeered as “let’s liberate the woman root from the hypocritical metaphors of the feminine.”^[42]

The theme of roots would resurface as a rhizomatic structure, representing the long-concealed interconnections among women, in the site-specific installation (fig. 9). Extending from an egg-shaped object crafted from metal and paper, the white roots spread throughout the exhibition space, even outside, where one root sprouted from a pavement crevice. In contrast to the earth’s traditionally feminine coding, in From Woman to Woman Passing through the Sky these roots floated free, as if ascending toward the sky, suggesting women’s access to the spiritual realm. Unlike the Gruppo Femminista Immagine, the Neapolitan collective recurred to the vibrant and metaphoric language of popular culture, refraining from a conceptual explanation of their artistic practice. Yet, the constellation of exhibited works testifies to the collective’s attempt at overcoming conventional assumptions concerning women, ranging from mental inferiority (engrained in ancient mythology) to being naturally inclined towards care work (as informing domestic labor) and being inherently linked to earthly immanence (as defined by traditional notions of nature).

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Gruppo Donne/Immagine/Creatività, From Woman to Woman Passing through the Sky, 1978, site-specific installation, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view, 1978 Venice Biennale, Open Space at the Zattere (detail)

A programmatic disruption of the association between women and nature was even more central to the Gruppo Femminista Immagine. As the title From the Creativity of the Woman as Maternity-Nature to the Control Research of Nature implied, the exhibited artworks – five textile banners of the same format, individually crafted by the five participating artists and centrally suspended on a circular metal structure – employed techniques, materials, and motifs associated with women’s care work, yet the artistic engagement with the reproductive realm was understood only as a provisional phase on the way to a full control of nature (fig. 10).^[43] Informing the Varese collective’s efforts, in fact, was a radical concept, outlined in a paper dated 15 May 1978, in the form of a diagram and a manifesto-like text (fig. 11),^[44] testifying to an attentive reception of Shulamith Firestone’s polarizing essay The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, first published in 1970 and translated into Italian in 1971. Firestone’s text, partly indebted to the work of Simone de Beauvoir, combined psycho-analytical and Marxist approaches with original cybernetic ideas to imagine an actual liberation of women from the responsibility of childbirth. In her incendiary critique of the “reactionary hippie-Rousseauean Return-to-Nature,” 25-year-old Firestone argued for a temporary appropriation of the means of reproduction (through fertility control) on the way to a final outsourcing of reproduction through technological solutions.^[45] By overcoming traditional concepts of parenthood, the nuclear family, gender roles, and conventional notions of marriage, the belief system that portrayed women as inherently suited to reproductive tasks would be overthrown, and gender differences would be made irrelevant in all aspects of society. For Firestone, this “ultimate revolution” required a cultural revolution first. A direct participation of women in male-dominated culture was inauthentic. Only by integrating the “Male (Technological Mode) with the Female (Aesthetic Mode)” would an “androgynous culture” emerge.^[46] The idea that the latter had to envision what the former could produce invested women’s art with a special task in the process of humanity’s mastering of nature.

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Gruppo Femminista Immagine Varese, From the Creativity of the Woman as Maternity-Nature to the Control Research of Nature, 1978, site-specific installation, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view, 1978 Venice Biennale, Open Space at the Zattere (detail)

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Gruppo Femminista Immagine Varese, Dalla creatività femminile maternità-natura al controllo-ricerca della natura, 15 May 1978, concept paper, cover. Porto Marghera, ASAC, Archivio Storico della Biennale di Venezia

On the outer side of the circular display that enclosed the exhibition area at the Open Space, the Varese collective hung thousands of postcards with natural motifs to reference the first phase of “female creativity as maternity-nature.” As they outlined in the concept, implicitly referring to Firestone’s account, in prehistoric times the principle of creativity coincided with women by way of motherhood, while men specialized in the creation of artefacts. After the discovery of fatherhood, men gained comprehensive control over culture, enforcing a division of labor derived from women’s reproductive cycles, and thus sealed their exclusion from history. Unfolding inside the circular display, then, was the phase of the “control research of nature.” The fact that the five textile banners hovered high above and reflected themselves in an inflatable water basin centrally placed underneath the works, referencing the female-coded element of water or the amniotic fluid, seems to translate the sense of an anticipated overcoming of reproductive responsibilities. Furthermore, the textiles might have been intended to embody Firestone’s “female Aesthetic Mode” in individual ways. While Secol and Parrocchetti’s works alienated and subverted traditional handicraft, combining female figures or symbols with a deliberately dilettante execution, and Sironi’s work contrasted the strict grid of masculine design (i.e., Hippodamus’ city plan of Miletus) through the female-coded materials of trimming and lace, Cibaldi and Gandini developed unambiguously transformative iconographies. Cibaldi’s fabric featured paper butterflies with their wings spread, leaving behind an assemblage of family photographs. Gandini stitched overlapping silhouettes of pregnant female figures on the right side of her textile. Threads connected them between each other but also to a giant cross shape located in the left half of the work, otherwise left blank, visualizing the projected end of procreation. “I stop in the air, and look down in my water, good-bye mother, one more moment I reflect myself with the others and I go to forget my fascinating nature,” read the collective’s statement in the exhibition catalogue, stressing the transitional dimension of the contribution.^[47]

The 1978 Venice Biennale’s main discourse, although amusingly belittled in Sordi’s comedy, obliquely reiterated traditional notions of masculine artistic creatorship as a form of control over a feminized nature. Under the slogan From Nature to Art, from Art to Nature, care work appeared to be naturalized as female. Subjected to the artist’s intellectual command, it was recast within the formal conventions of the neo-avantgardes. And yet, off the Biennale’s main paths, at the Open Space, the fictional fruit vendors Remo and Augusta would have encountered a feminist artistic engagement with care work motivated by quite a different aim: that of undoing the socially and historically constructed link between female-read individuals and nature. While Bentivoglio’s all-women show Materialization of Language still strategically identified with notions of mater and materia in order to integrate a “female aesthetics” into the official canon of verbo-visual art, the shows by Gruppo Donne/Immagine/Creatività and Gruppo Femminista Immagine especially engaged with reproductive work only to anticipate its obsolescence, i.e., “to forget [women’s] fascinating nature.”^[48] Their anti-essentialist stance striving to de-link woman from nature, informed by Marxist approaches ranging from the International Wages for Housework Campaign to Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex, seems still relevant today: albeit inadvertently, ecofeminist tendencies risk reviving a “return to nature” narrative which, as the Varese and Naples collectives rightly noted back in 1978, aligns with patriarchal conventions.^[49]