Questioning female body aesthetics and societal tensions: Marilisa Cosello’s 2 of 2 as a metaphor of women identity in the Italian society
Marilisa Cosello: Performing the female body
The artist’s multidisciplinarity is suggested by her use of different art forms to convey her research focus. Through staged performances, photography and video art she indeed conceptually works around body participation and performance construction, activating a dialogue between history, culture and social structures. Moving between conceptual, visual and performing arts, Cosello’s practice touches on societal, real struggles and moves to abstract, conceptual dimensions.
Her practice is deeply contemporary, characterized by body participation and performance construction, merging different forms of investigation concerning power, overlapping public and private, family rituals and collective archetypes. Her photographs, performances, videos stage the body and society’s archetypes to articulate political ideas, personal struggles, women’s conditions, society’s expectations.
Cosello’s work merges different forms of investigation concerning power, overlapping public and private, family rituals and collective archetypes, reflecting on the political nature of the individual body as a subject and the impact of power dynamics on personal and collective narratives.
Marilisa Cosello: The body as a political subject
Marilisa Cosello’s art practice is rebellious, bold, yet delicate. It is conceived at the intersection of concepts and forms in tension. Her art starts from the body and its participation in a defined space, which determines the construction of the performance. History, culture, and social structures converge and overlap through the public and the private, familial rituals and collective archetypes. Cosello’s research thus develops as a reflection on the political nature of the body as a subject in close dependence on power dynamics through history. Political ideas, individual battles, women’s condition, and society’s expectations articulate in the staged performances she proposes to spectators.
Marilisa Cosello, 2 of 2
2 of 2 is a sport centered performance extending the definition of relationship, power, restraints in an imagined tennis field, a hybridized landscape where attraction and repulsion act upon body and body politics. Revolved around two ball girls on a tennis field, the performance commutes an interaction across the personal and the collective dimensions. The echo of the title refers to a self-contained narrative, aiming at deconstructing, reinventing and critiquing modes and modules of production, especially those that construct national and patriarchal narratives, occupy space and ultimately contribute to collective history.
For eighteen minutes, the performers fight over the tennis balls, which are metaphors of power, desire, and aspiration. In the artist’s words «the minimal asset of the performance results in dissecting the sporting ritual, its details and ramifications».
The unexpected structures in which the performative action takes shape – empty rooms (2021-2022) and the Orto Botanico of Palermo (2022) – have the effect of dissecting the relational ritual as under a magnifying glass, the details of which reveal the implications of a conflict that becomes an existential metaphor.
Marilisa Cosello: Staging female power
The performers’ bodies move in the space merging in a single, plastic form which stands as an un-finished abstraction that continuously changes. They build up a tension field, a dual system that collapses. Resistance thus melts into the coexistence of two of two bodies, thus two bodies gathered in a self-sufficient system. Conceptually, the performers stand as metaphors for binary notions that fuse in one through their interaction and tension, such as the individual and the collective, the personal and the political. The singular’s power, desires and aspirations collide with the other’s, as much as different collectivities and political parties do.
The decontextualization of the performance act itself suggests the idea of a self-sufficient narrative that aims to deconstruct, reinvent, and criticize modes of production, especially those contributing to the construction of nationalist and patriarchal narratives, yet histories, and collective behaviors.
Marilisa Cosello: For a mythology of women bodies
Within her long-term project Try, Cosello’s latest performance 2 of 2 stands as a continuation of a research on womanness and its archetypes in Italian society. Cosello has long questioned the aesthetic under the lens of the political, meaning the aesthetics of power have been a gravitational center of her performative and photographic works, in particular Fascism’s aesthetics of power.
Cosello’s long-term work Try, is a complex and extensive body started in 2020 which lingers around sport through a series of performances that see female athletes measuring themselves in competitions with the self and the others. Always decontextualized, these performances have taken place in urban spaces, art-dedicated places to reimagine a new mythology of the feminine, given the historical framework of the Olympic Games. History thus serves Cosello as a scenario to disrupt, a point of departure that then results in being a present condition, as it lives through collective memory.
As mythologies are built on traditions, Cosello’s work is built on a counter-tradition which the artist’s individuates in her own kind of Olympic Games with the objective of reappropriating the image and conception of women’s bodies not only in the context of sport but also in the societal fabric.
Marilisa Cosello: The female body in the context of the Olympic Games
Women were performing sports in skirts during Fascist times. Over time, the Olympic Games also distorted the image of women’s bodies to make them look good and perfect rather than seeing them as athletes. Observing the feminine over history and in the contemporary, Cosello dives deep in the stereotyped image of femininity in society to deconstruct its mythology and construct an alternative. Patriarchy still rules and affects the way womanness is perceived nowadays. Along the lines with punk culture, which has been centered around destroying the iconic images in society, Cosello takes up the same approach by destroying the iconic image of womanness in sports and society at large, conceiving performances that crumble the perfect image of the female body into grotesque and post-human images.
Marilisa Cosello: The performance costumes
The costumes and props of Cosello’s works are a vital element in her artistic research: through the customization of each item of clothing worn and used by the performers in photos, videos and performances, she adds semantic layers to her narratives.
Clothes are what define people, by connoting one’s identity. In 2 of 2, as in her major project Try, costumes are all white, sport uniforms on which the artist intervenes with spray colors. These constitute an archive of abstract symbols of reappropriation of the female body. By adding colors to the plain uniforms, her performances acquire a pictorial dimension and plasticity over the context they take place in. Likewise, in her last performance at Museo di Palazzo Riso in Palermo in 2022 – as part of Bam Festival del Mediterraneo – the two performers were wearing recognizable Adidas and Nike sportswears, drawing a more defined line between the performance dimension and contemporary society.
Marilisa Cosello: The aesthetics of female power
As an exercise of deconstruction, the performance sees the opening of two closed forms in the incorporation of one another. What results from the frictioning of the two bodies is the creation of the unaccomplished, non-aesthetic dimension of the unknown. What if the undoing of aesthetic forms is a possible antidote to techno-capitalism homogenisation of forms? The undoing of aesthetic forms which reveals in the coming together of abstract ones, or unknown forms that spectators can be drawn to and question for their ambiguity.
Reenacting, in a way, the same logic of Fascist aesthetics of power, Cosello tries to disrupt them, not politicizing her art, but activating internal frictions from within Fascist aesthetics, between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic, the beautiful and the grotesque. The primordial aesthetics of power lose their meaning, become empty and transform in a counter-aesthetic where the strength of the female body becomes ruler of the narrative around and within itself.
Marilisa Cosello
Marilisa Cosello was born in 1978 in Eboli, Italy. Her works have been exhibited in Italy and abroad at important institutions and events, including Fotografie Forum Frankfurt; Mediterranean Biennial of Contemporary Art, Sarajevo; Circulations Festival, Paris; Central Dupon, Paris; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; Museum of Santa Giulia, Brescia; Kunsthalle, Lana (BZ); European Photography, Reggio Emilia; Francesco Fabbri Foundation, Pieve di Soligo (TV); Centrale Fotografia, Fano.
