In the voices of others

With works by Leda Papaconstantinou & Carole Roussopoulos and Alice Visentin

A program curated by Marta Federici

“My work has always been in the voices of others,” Carole Roussopoulos (1945–2009) once said. Pioneering the use of the camera to accompany social struggles, especially feminist movements, Roussopoulos expressed a way of understanding filmmaking as a practice for engaging with life through dialogue. Quoting her words in its title, In the voices of others is a program curated by Marta Federici that thinks about art practice as a relational space and a tool for building collective narratives. It brings together Bouboulina, a film shot in 1981 by Leda Papaconstantinou and Carole Roussopoulos, and Material for a Thousand Stories, a newly developed performance by Alice Visentin. In their work these artists, belonging to different generations, gather stories and testimonies through encounters with people and places, and combine them into polyphonic accounts that address social dynamics and trace personal and shared experiences into spatial as well as emotional cartographies.

The two artists Leda Papaconstantiou (1945, Ambelonas, Greece) and Carole Roussopoulos (1945, Lausanne – 2009, Valais) met on the Greek Island Spetses. Their collaboration emerged due to their common interests: Both shared a feminist approach in art making and were committed to social and political issues. The camera became a tool to make contact with and talk to women on the island. Bouboulina was shot using Roussopoulos’s lightweight Sony Portapak Camera, standing as one of the first examples in Greece of a video documentary form made in the “cinéma militant” mode introduced by Roussopoulos—that is, a tradition of politically engaged cinema that emerged in France during the events of May 1968, with the desire to give voice to underrepresented subjects. In the work, the legacy of Laskarina Bouboulina (ca. 1776–1825), a legendary figure from Spetses who acted as a naval female commander during the Greek War of Independence in 1821, is discussed by female inhabitants of the islands interviewed by the artists. The women of Spetses speak while carrying on daily activities, such as weaving, and relate their own living conditions to the memory of the famous heroine, talking about work, education and affective relationships in the context of a small island where time seems to set its own pace. Papaconstantinou and Roussopoulos are – as the latter liked to define herself – more “conductors than directors,” who encourage and orchestrate the threads of thought suggested by their interlocutors, emphasizing listening as a practice.

Listening is also at the center of Alice Visentin’s work (1993, Cuorgnè, Italy). In her performance Material for a Thousand Stories (2024), she combines images and sounds in a reinterpreted form of what the artist calls “analogue cinema”. Instead of film reel, a long roll of drawn and painted paper is manually unfolded and run over the bottom plate of an episcope, a tool similar to a magic lantern that transforms the opaque images into light projections. Simultaneously, a soundscape recomposes recordings sampled by the artist during her journeys to different locations. We hear the sea backwashing inside a cave on the Sardinian coast blending with distant chatter, bells, sounds in the London Underground, fragments of a spoken word concert, and more. Visentin collects bits of reality through the exploration of places, conversations with people, books and gossip, then weaves them together in an intuitive approach. Coming from an education and practice in painting, the artist is drawn to cinema for its imaginative potential and possibilities of montage. Put into motion, her works summon the mercurial texture of dreams and are permeated with the lights and shadows of memories, or fantasies. In them, life is never caught in a fixed representation, but messed up by a process of proliferation that enacts a constant shift of meanings. If we refer to Leda and Carole as conductors, we might think of Visentin’s work as a vessel for the emergence of subterranean tales that flow out and spread in multiple rivulets.

In the voices of others is part of the extended research project Geografie dei sé / Geographies of the Selves led by Marta Federici. The project investigates the production of images and the elaboration of narratives in video works and experimental films that portray the shifts and changes in the Mediterranean region. By questioning the role and space of artistic practices in witnessing social, political and cultural transformations within this region, the research develops a reflection on themes such as the construction of hegemonic narratives, the value of audio-visual materials as historical records and documents, and the relationship between image and memory.

Geografie dei sé / Geographies of the Selves was developed with the support of the Italian Council program of 2023, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture with the aim of fostering Italian contemporary art.

 *

Leda Papaconstantinou (1945, Ambelonas, Greece) lives and works on the island of Spetses. Papaconstantinou studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts in 1965–1966, moved to London to study Fine Arts at the Loughton College of Art and at the Maidstone College of Art before returning to Greece in 1971. In the years between 1975–1979, she instigated a community-based “poor” theatre called Spetsiotiko Theatro – Spetses Players. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in international institutions. In 2024 her retrospective exhibition Time in my hands was presented at the EMST National Museum of Contemporary Art, Αthens.

Carole Roussopoulos (1945–2009) spent her childhood in Sion, before studying in Lausanne. In 1967, she left Switzerland for Paris, where she met her future husband Paul Roussopoulos, with whom she founded the militant collective Video Out. In 1970, she made her first film Genet parle d’Angela Davis. As a feminist activist she filmed and took part in the action during their years of struggle and accompanied the new social movements that emerged in the wake of May 68. In 1982, together with Delphine Seyrig and Ioana Wieder, she founded the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, the first feminist audiovisual archive. She died in 2009, leaving behind a body of work comprising over a hundred films.

Alice Visentin (1993, Cuorgnè, Italy) graduated from the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin in 2018. She is co-founder and co-curator of the self-organized school Bagni D’Aria. In 2024, she presented the exhibitions Amanti Fabula at Sunday in London and Everyday Mystery at Gió Marconi Gallery in Milan. In 2023, she was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome and presented the solo exhibition The Morning Tide of Moods at Lateral Roma. Other solo exhibitions include Malefate at Almanac Project in Turin and Planète at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris, both in 2021. In 2024, she was selected for a fellowship at Gasworks in London and awarded a scholarship from the 13th edition of the Italian Council program of the Italian the Ministry of Culture.

Marta Federici is a curator and independent researcher. She co-directs the art space Lateral Roma (Rome, IT) and the curatorial platform LOCALES. From 2021–2024, she worked at MACTE Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Termoli (IT), where she co-curated the exhibition Bruno’s House by Salvatore Arancio (2024). In 2023, she curated Nolwenn Salaün’s solo exhibition Leave the door ajar / Leave the door ajar at Almanac Inn, Turin. She has curated presentations and public programs at: Museum of Civilizations, Rome; 3 137 / Enterprise Projects, Athens; Magazzino Italian Art, New York; Museo Madre, Naples; Villa Arson, Nice (upcoming).

*

8 pm
Introduction by Marta Federici

8.15 pm
Screening of Leda Papaconstantinou & Carole Roussopoulos, Bouboulina (1981)

Break

9.15 pm
Performance of Alice Visentin, Material for a Thousand Stories (2024)

 *

The research project Geografie dei sé / Geographies of the Selves led by Marta Federici is granted by the Italian Council program of 2023.

The film Bouboulina is on loan from Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, who is in charge of distributing all of Carole Roussopoulos' films.