THE DISQUIETING MUSES OF CHIARA FUMAI:
BETWEEN TRUTH AND LIES
My name is legion, for we are many.
Mark 5:9
The following text is based on my intimate correspondence, both professional and personal, with Chiara Fumai. A note on the text: like the artist herself, I intend to make use of textual appropriation, plundering from the thoughts conveyed to me without declaring each time that I have done so. Everything that appears in italics or quotation marks might be a faithful transcription of one of her thought experiments or, alternatively, a brand-new elaboration stemming from my capacity to read between her lines. This Last Line Cannot Be Translated—the title of her last work and our final collaboration, shown posthumously in the Italian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale—docet. A belabored reconstruction, a study in variants and consonances; philology, but also interpretation. Her work, whatever its guise, is performative, and for this reason presupposes an intuitive capacity to recreate the conditions for its materialization. In Fumai’s oeuvre, like in Andrej Tarkovsky’s, reality remains invariably atmospheric and needs to be lived through the emotions of the protagonist. It is in terms of its attribution of meaning that each event can and must be received.
“Comrades,” “sisters,” “allies”: these were the epithets Fumai used most frequently to address letters of collaboration or requests for help; to invoke characters to host and to wear like a second skin—her body a disguise to re-inhabit. Unlike for the pagurus armatus in perpetual search of a new home, it was the houses that came to her, asking for her physical and spiritual mediation. Her body became the host, while the characters alternated and multiplied, using her constantly like a means without an end. They are histories, only apparently completed, that find in her a voice so as to be reanimated, admired and reread in a continuous process of reverberation and engulfment. “I really like the militant, combative aspect of most of the figures I try to incarnate.” Her first digital signature, footnoted like declaration of intent and, contextually, a professional description, dates to February 21, 2011. It is the eloquent sentence: “Representing: Annie Jones, Nico Fumai, the Opium Addict, Stars of the East, Metasocialism and other spells.” A gallery of powerful characters united by an impelling and atavistic need for vindication; Fumai presents herself as their agent and spokesperson, a consensual spouse, available and faithful. A legion, enriched and complicated over time before it surrendered, in the last lapidary and omni-comprehensive assertion below her signature: “Big Enemies Big Honor.” This sentence, a re-adaptation of the famous Multos inimicos, honorem multum of the De Bello Gallico, was appropriated by, among others—and aside from Mussolini—the ferocious German general Georg von Frundsberg, a Landsknecht leader in service of the Holy Roman Empire who led the Imperial troupes all the way to the “new Babylon” with the intention of hanging the Pope. It is a citation well suited to Fumai’s poetic, subversive faith, her anti-conventional interpretive universe. It also appears meaningfully in the final part of her life, when she too would sometimes emerge as a figure to impersonate, while her companions in misfortune, branded by a deep sisterhood, became spaces, contexts, atmospheres, offensive strategies or even semantic fields: “NEFANDISSIMA OPERA VENEFICA. Chiara Fumai. Home of Eusapia Palladino, Solanas, Killers Elite, Italo disco, online sermones and ekstatic feminism.”
Who knows which chapter of this personal and demonic Compendium Maleficarum might have received two of the last illustrious beings the artist was brooding over. Namely, the fifteenth-century French-Venetian author Christine de Pizan, with whom she shared the vision of an allegorical and ideal city, a neural network, an exclusively female palace of memory—though composed, in Fumai, not of noblewomen but of the artist’s own rogue, sincere and a-virtuosistic incarnations; and the English writer, activist and founder of the Hermetic Society, Anna Kingsford. It is to this latter, who “killed the vivisectionist Louis Pasteur with astral attacks,” that Fumai would have dedicated the project Thunder, proposed for a residency at the Tate St. Ives in Cornwall that did not have time to take place. Like Fumai, Kingsford was a devoted animal rights advocate and ardent supporter of vegetarianism, openly and radically defensive of the test subjects she saw tortured at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, in various experiments unalleviated by anesthetic. One of Kingsford’s biographers recounts her standing for hours under a torrential rainfall, immobile and apparently inert, on the street of Pasteur’s laboratory. Consequences: pneumonia and then tuberculosis, sentencing her to her early death at age forty-one. An anecdote to which Fumai refers, plausibly, when she imagines the Theosophist—inclined to evangelizing her faith—effortfully engaged in directing energy fields against the celebrated French chemist and microbiologist. The dates remain uncertain, but the luminary’s apoplectic disturbances follow a credible parabola. It was in fact known that Kingsford, the second English woman to obtain a degree in Medicine, was above all an expert in astral visions, sometimes induced through the use of psychoactive substances such as chloroform. Similarly, in one of her first performative acts, staged live on a hot mid-August day in 2011, Fumai, embodying both the illusionist Harry Houdini and his special assistant Rosa Luxemburg, recited a double script in the form of a non-dialogue, using fragments extrapolated from the letter that the revolutionary wrote to Sophie Liebknecht from prison (1917), shortly before being killed. “The text, profoundly meaningful, but equally controversial, reveals the socialist theorist’s feeling of compassion for animals, opening the path toward a new, visionary, but uncomfortable utopia.” Fumai’s protagonists share common interests, resemblances, even simply on an aesthetic level. They share attitudes, predispositions, viewpoints, neuroses. They are blood sisters. Some of them grow in her work and introspection, while others remain starting points, sketches, valid for further narratives, with or without a backbone. Netta Fornario, for example, appears and disappears hastily over the course of our 2016 correspondence. The daughter of an Italian doctor and an English lady, she joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, whose members included the well-known occultist Aleister Crowley. In November 1929, the thirty-three-year-old decided, suddenly and with no explanation, to relocate to the island of Iona off the Western coast of Scotland, a place considered amongst the most mystical on Earth. Her naked body, covered in deep scratches not attributable to any animal present on the island, was found—two days after her disappearance—wrapped in a mysterious black cloak and placed above a cross dug into the ground with a dagger, it too discovered on the scene. No one was able to establish the exact cause of her death. A few days before her disappearance, Netta had confided to her innkeeper that she had received disturbing messages urging her to accede to another dimension. She had suffered psychic attacks that disturbed her energy bodies and pushed her to think that unknown persons had manipulated her will. All that remains of Netta in Fumai’s work are a few notes: literature and rumors.
Each of these figures possesses an empathic connection to the artist and her history. “I don’t choose them, they come to me. By themselves. Through a process of intuition that I can’t direct.” For a long time, and until the very end, there was Eusapia Palladino. In The Book of Evil Spirits, Palladino invoked the “others” through the narratological expedient of mise en abyme, in a game of Chinese boxes, houses within houses, engulfments and possessions, lasting as long as the resolution of the characters allowed it—a stylistic device often adopted by Fumai to enhance the chorality of her allies. “I respect her for her irony and for having remained outside of any schema… The illiterate Apulian medium who drew on her sexual allure to seduce scientific researchers, rigorously male. Among them Cesare Lombroso and Charles Richet, both of whom became her lovers.” But beyond the femme fatale medium, there are also Le Solanas, a conspicuous multitude of unstoppable feminists: a legion of affiliated daughters, Fumai’s Assassins. “It is we who go. We unwork without a break, we plan everything in detail, we spend hours putting on disguises, we’re as tireless as elves. We’re madwomen. If only we were! We have simply chosen deculturation as a mode of action. That’s why we are never the same woman. We’d like to compose an alphabet that cannibalizes language through its margins, its S.C.U.M. dregs, which are also its limits. We come spoken [parlatA] to live this experience completely.” Their language possesses the force of fire, it is incandescent, feverish, spat, but communication can also come about by other, non-verbal means. And so prolonged silence becomes just as expressive and emotionally dangerous. The icy museum guide of I Did Not Say or Mean “Warning” diligently recites her script, illustrating a selection of works on display at the Fondazione QueriniStampalia in Venice. A few canvases by Giovanni Bellini, Vincenzo Catena and Niccolò Cassana take center stage. The analysis lingers on several faces that elude the gaze, that seem to lack expressivity or vital spirit in the pictorial rendering. They are the faces of women, living models, ideal figures, prototypes—their identity negated or unspoken or hidden and camouflaged by the patriarchal history they couldn’t escape: Nicolosia Mantegna Bellini, Rosa da Scardona and the Dogaressa Elisabetta Querini Valier. Once again, a double or actually triple articulation that slowly eclipses the accompanist, the rite’s officiant, to give space and finally speech to the women depicted. The narration stays in the third person, but the language is proper to the time in which they lived—up until the moment when another possession infiltrates, “shouting” in the language of the deaf-mute the speech of an Italian terrorist, recorded by an answering machine moments before the woman’s suicide. The message is conveyed in various fragments throughout the course of the performative action, but if we recomposed them, they would utter: “I am conservation, self-conservation, daily life, adaptation, conflict mediation, tension release, the survival of the objects of my love. Nourishment, I am all this against myself, against the possibility of understanding who I am. I am precisely in my madness, in my self-destruction / And so I look inside myself and try to stop thinking about what is good and what is bad. What is right and what is wrong. And I feel the need to destroy myself, to explode, to not always think in continuity with my personal history / Maybe it’s because I do not have history. Maybe because everything I see as my history otherwise seems like an outfit that’s been put on me and that I can’t take off. And so I begin to think about the act of exploding, about shattering / It means that I can’t defeat my resignation and subordination if I don’t defeat the enemies I have unmasked / If I don’t recognize my wrath and I don’t make it explode with my violence against the ideology and the apparatus of violence that oppresses me. If I don’t find in other women the same desire to go beyond, to attack, to destroy, to knock down all the walls and barriers.”
Their contours are as messy as those of clouds. The matter that separates them is gaseous. It is difficult for them to stay inside the lines. They are inclined to spill over, as though the borders between their personalities and what moves around them might unexpectedly and suddenly dissolve, become deformed, splinter. Elena
Ferrante uses the word frantumaglia—a jumble of fragments—to define precisely this state of being, “a disquiet not otherwise definable,” a “miscellaneous crowd of things in her head, debris in a muddy water of the brain.” 1 It is a state of being also shared by Fumai’s Muses.
I remember perceiving similar sensations as an adolescent, thinking that I don’t have a path, that I’m a sort of “element” along someone else’s trajectory. This feeling of a lack of identity and of the impossibility of control was sometimes so dramatic that it transformed into a real disintegration of my being. I seemed to be splintering into myriad dispersed particles that would never again recompose. To feel grounded while in this dimension, I would ask the people closest to me to call me by my name. As though that naming were the only bind, the only harness that could really hold me together, that could guarantee my presence and existence. I explained this to a friend and she told me that actually, in certain spiritual disciplines, this feeling of dispersion of one’s being and body was considered a sign of liberation, of elevation, of a sort of beyond-human evolution. I needed to be called by my name to stay on earth, because I was afraid to fly, while only the initiated manage to break apart into particles and free themselves. “Witchcraft with a capital W should be the whole of the Law” was the most recurrent epilogue to her digital missives, only rarely replaced by “Embroidery everyday should be the Whole of the Law.”
Fumai’s work traces a fine, invisible line—undisclosed to the spectator—between what is real and what is fictitious. The two realms become confused; they live in symbiosis. In any case, their scission is biologically improper. Performativity becomes the noumenon of the whole of existence. As in Schopenhauer, it is through the process of will that Fumai is able to move from the subjective to the universal and to make her beloved Sisters her own. It is as though she were able, by absorbing them, to make them relive inside her, like a treasure chest. The various characters act as portals through which to reconnect to the unicum, like a mutual passage that opens other infinite locks. Such is the case of The Moral Exhibition House, a dwelling inspired by the pseudoscientific shows of the nineteenth century and built for
dOCUMENTA(13) (2012), in which Fumai herself became the bewitched house, not the witch or the attraction du jour. Like a Matryoshka, she was at once host and guest, both of honor. In her interpretations, the artist asks us to believe in her heroines, placed on stage in the act of visitation and medianic transmission. She asks, fundamentally, that we adhere to her credo, to The Church of Chiara Fumai. It matters little that many of the characters she revisits were themselves performers who, in the act of appropriating their characters, ended up identifying with them and making them more real than the real, in a hyperbolic experiment of reality: “My characters are united by the fact that in their lives, they carried out performative activities that were highly admirable both in their contents and in their relational strategies. Our collaborations are the same as those that develop between a curator and her artists, with the sole difference that mine are ghosts.” That is the case, for example, of Annie Jones and Zalumma Agra, both characters born of the Forer or Barnum Effect, so called in honor of Phineas Taylor Barnum—the owner of the most famous Victorian-era American circus and founder of the eponymous museum. Both women were part of his arsenal of “freak shows.” The first was the most famous “bearded lady” of her time, a woman who, born with a severe case of hirsutism, made a virtue of her difference; the second, dubbed the “Star of the East,” was the only exemplar of a “pure” race—the Circassian. Born in the Russian city of Suldanu Kale, Agra was first kidnapped and made a concubine in Constantinople, to then be saved and find a better life in Barnum’s circus.
The entrepreneur—who at the end of his career declared himself a mystifier—played on the individual’s tendency to believe that any description, however generic, was perfectly tailored to their person. In Fumai, the generic becomes the pretext for giving voice to a greater number of authors: in enacting her characters, she creates a choral work, giving them the possibility to enter the scene and read their unfinished novels. In this sense, Fumai’s oeuvre can be seen as a constant example of metempsychosis. Her spiritual séances should themselves be understood not as mere attempts at theatrical staging, but as a process of transfiguration of her heroines’ souls, as the last attempt to give them a voice, the final push to give them completion.
Peeking out among them is also the Whore of Babylon, manifested through the spiritistic possession of the performing body of any Pentecostal Brazilian prevaricator in the video Per Vas Nefandum (2016). In our intervention, we will use an alphabet that is Judeo-Christian but secular, representing the antagonist according to the sacred descriptions. This antagonist is number 7, namely, she who guides the “beast”… We use the language of the persecutors and executioners to show the fear of an imminent revolt, already blatantly announced: the number 777, the sacred prostitute times three, in other words, the trinity.
I give you some good news: seven will be followed by eight, that is, the Infinite and the coexistence of two genders in each individual.