A story from Circolo della rosa

Alex Martinis Roe
A story from
Circolo della rosa
Opening on Friday, 21 February at Archive Kabinett, Alex
Martinis Roe will show her new film A story from Circolo della
Rosa, and a sculpture in the Archive Kabinett window, both of
which continue her work on feminist genealogies. The film is
narrated by the artist’s voice and is addressed to a close colleague
in the form of a letter, telling a story about two women. The film
weaves together fragments from her recent oral history research
with members of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective and
her experiences of their collective activities, as well as her
exploration of related spaces, archives and texts.
The film traces the story of two experimental historians who began
working together on feminist pedagogical experiments in the late
1980s and explores the nature of their relationship, which can be
described as one of affidamento (entrustment). Affidamento is a
social-symbolic practice exercised and theorized by the Milan
Women’s Bookstore Collective and is a reciprocal relationship of
entrustment between two adult women. By referring to one another,
each gives the other authority in her spheres of political practice by
acknowledging her desires, competences and differences. This
practice of acknowledgement involves a commitment to one
another, a commitment to each other’s sexual difference, and is the
fabric with which the collective is formed. Martinis Roe explores
the lived history of this practice as a way to narrate her own political
relationships, and as a way to imagine feminist futures located in
networks and affiliations across different times and places.
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A story from Circolo della rosa
On the occasion of A Story of Circolo della rosa Alex Martinis
Roe selected a series of books from both her personal library and
The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. The collection takes
the form of an open access reference library at Archive Kabinett
inviting users for individual or collective reading, serving as site
for sharing resources and ways of thinking. Excerpts from this
collection will also be made available on GRRAAAAARG.
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Alex Martinis Roe
Laura Minguzzi and
Marirì Martinengo
in conversation with
Alex Martinis Roe
AMR: We began our discussions at the Milan Women’s Bookstore’s club, Circolo della rosa, because I came in search of stories
of affidamento [entrustment] within the collective that theorized it.
Can you briefly explain what you understand a relationship of affidamento to be, and how it relates to the structure of your collective?
LM: The relationship of affidamento relies on the will to win and
disparities between women. This means giving priority to the
relationship with a woman, a shift of symbolic reference that one
has in order to be in the world, to realise a project and guide their
choices in life and work, to signify difference and to valorise the
mother tongue. It's about building a symbolic order based on the
genealogy between women, which refers to the mother. The
Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, where affidamento has
been theorized as a political practice, is a female society that
forecasts a different way of understanding the relationships
between men and women and social and economic relations. In
my experience, the affidamento to Marirì Martinengo was the
primary force that gave me the strength to realise my dream to
move to Milan, where I could teach more freely and carry out
projects that I had thought about for many years.
AMR: What do you see as being the challenges in making
histories of affidamento?
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Laura Minguzzi and Marirì Martinengo
LM: The challenge for me is to record memory, resignifying and
making history starting from the experiences and relationships
that have created what we call female strength. For example,
in DonnaWomanFemme magazine, where we published the
writings of our storia vivente [living history], following the
example of Marirì, I was able to tell my own story, especially
one about a tragic event in my life, which conditioned my
relationships and my choices. It was a gamble that gave me back
a sense of liberation and justice, and consequently a greater
consciousness of my presence in public.
AMR: One of the books you worked on together is called Cambia
il mondo cambia la storia. La differenza sessuale nella ricerca
storica e nell’insegnamento [Change the world, change history:
Sexual difference in historical research and teaching], which is
a compilation of papers from a conference of the same title held
at Casa della cultura di Milano in 2001. Can you summarize the
practices discussed in it to give a sense of your work together?
LM: The conference was organized by Marirì Martinengo and
The Community of Pedagogical Practice and Reflection and
Historical Research (the current Community of Living History),
of which I am a member. The conference is to be considered as
an important step on the community’s evolutionary path. The
meeting was preceded by a series of conversations, called the
Tè storia pasticcini [Tea History Pastries], which took place in
the Circolo della rosa. Our intention was to see what the crucial
points of history were, to analyze and to clarify them, and to
then discuss them in a public debate. The conference was the
culmination of our work in the Community up until that point,
and at the same time a point to bounce off, toward new
destinations. A conference on history, on the way of doing it,
and the mode of teaching it, and at the same time a conference
on our political practice, founded on the cut of difference and
on female freedom. History is the most political of subjects that
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in conversation with Alex Martinis Roe
we teach in schools. Essential points: the importance of context
(places where women are always present); subjective narration
as disruptive force; the invention in the field of historiography
in the sense of invenire (to put oneself into research and to find),
not in the sense of disregarding sources; the need for conflict
in order to avoid surrendering to war or the quiet life…
AMR: Can you describe your more recent practice of storia
vivente and how it affects both the writing and the writer?
LM: In 2006 Marirì Martinengo enacted a radical change in our
working group. After her statement, "There is a living history nestled
in each of us," she proposed to the women of the Community to call
our nascent practice storia vivente, i.e., the self-investigation we
undertake is the drive for a way of writing history on behalf of
women, the unveiling of the subject that makes history is the main
document to draw from. This change was anticipated by the
publication in 2005 of a history book about her grandmother, La
voce del silenzio. Memoria e storia di Maria Massone, donna
“sottratta” [The voice of silence: Memory and history of Maria
Massone, a woman "taken away"]. The necessity of giving words
and visibility to a hidden history of women, silenced and erased from
the family for years, has made the symbolic meaning of subjective
narration clear. From the value of the word of a woman who becomes
a historical document, a symbolic can be born, a point of view of
interpretation which gives a different reading of a particular historical
period and of an environment, which in her case was bourgeois. In
my case, however, telling the story of my mother, from a peasant
context, gave an interpretation of Italian history in the sixties, of
which there is no trace of in official history. The true history is one
that expresses love, not just the data sources traditionally considered
historic, and that love is expressed by narrating history which results
from the implacable dialogue between the female historian and the
relation (with a person, with an issue, with a question, with a
desire) which are at the origin of her vocation as a historian.
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Many thanks to:
Valerio del Baglivo, Luca Bergamaschi, Paolo Caffoni, Chiara Deidda, Chiara Figone,
Simone Frangi, Alicia Frankovich, Fiona Geuß, Nicola Guy, Mihovil Markulin, Marirì
Martinengo, Laura Minguzzi, Giulio Verago, Renata Sarfati, Traudel Sattler, Melanie
Sehgal, Archive Kabinett, Libreria delle donne di Milano and Viafarini, Milan.
Printed on the ocassion of
“A story from Circolo della rosa”
Alex Martinis Roe (video 08.18)
Organised by Fiona Geuß
Archive Kabinett - 2014
Made possible with support by
Graduiertenschule, Universität der Künste Berlin