Microreview: Openings

Bethonico Review 1
Photograph of Makita in the exhibition FEMINIST ENERGY CRISIS (2017)
Bethonico Review 2
Photograph of the artist book L'Origine, taken by Mabe Bethônico (2021)
Bethonico Review 3
Photograph of the artist book L'Origine, taken by Mabe Bethônico (2021)
Bethonico Review 4
Photograph of the artist book L'Origine, taken by Mabe Bethônico (2021)
Bethonico Review 5
Photograph of the artist book L'Origine, taken by Mabe Bethônico (2021)
Date
2021 January
Subtitle
Mabe Bethônico reviews L’Origine, artist book by Angela Marzullo, with text by Sarah Zürcher. Geneva, Published by Éditions Centre de la photographie Genève and Les Éditions Ripopée, 2019.
Type
microreview
Author / Publisher
Mabe Bethônico for NewsLibrary
Author Info

Mabe Bethônico is an artist and reseacher who lives in Geneva, also working on curatorial and collective projects. She is presently a researcher at the École Superieure d’Art Annecy Alpes [ESAAA] and she teaches at HEAD – Genève. She was Associate Professor at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais between 2001 and 2020. https://www.mabebethonico.online/

Language

English

Also published here

Newsletter No. 30

Instagram @sarn_switzerland

Reviewed Publication

L’Origine, artist book by Angela Marzullo, with text by Sarah Zürcher. Geneva, Published by Éditions Centre de la photographie Genève and Les Éditions Ripopée, 2019. Limited edition, 250 ex.

During her exhibition entitled FEMINIST ENERGY CRISIS at the Centre de la photographie Genève in 2017, Angela Marzullo, a.k.a. Makita, performed daily at 11:00 for 28 days. Each day she laid the daily Le Monde on the floor in an unfolded stack, choosing a page to be visible on top. With scissors she carefully opened a hole in the crease of the open fold, cutting an orifice through all pages while pulling out the edges of the cut. The set was left where it lay, occupying a space on the floor as an imaginary grid that was gradually built throughout the performances; as a 28-day diary, in reference to a menstrual cycle.

Photographs of the papers are reproduced in double pages of the book with same title as the performance, L’Origine. It comes with a steel blade to open the folds, which are not trimmed. To access the content we must cut. We then see Le Monde, with news of world economic, social, political tensions, cultural news and advertisements, while a force from within the material manifests as a carefully crafted brutal tearing.

A text by curator and critic Sarah Zürcher envelops the cover, demanding a gesture of unfolding, the spreading out of paper, in order to read it. By not providing direct access, the publication invites an action within and outside. It requires a will to engage and it implies a sense of risk (damaging the edition or hurting oneself). We are confronted with the rupture of the original and a sort of violation, experimenting with issues approached by Marzullo in her work and related to women in the socio-political tissue. She makes many references to violence, always in an ironic way, criticizing male cultural constructs. In the case of L’Origine, for example, the violence pointed out by the blade is finally only a gentle proposition to allow access to the pages.