Giovanna Zapperi

Giovanna Zapperi
Period: 2013-2014
Profession: Art historian Giovanna Zapperi is professor of art history and theory at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Bourges and associate researcher at CEHTA/EHESS. Her thesis, published under the title
L’artiste est une femme. La modernité de Marcel Duchamp (PUF, 2012), was awarded the Prix de la ville de Paris for gender studies. In 2007-2008, she was visiting professor at Berlin’s Humboldt University (“Rudolf Arnheim” chair) and, in 2009,
fellow at the Institut d’études avancées de Nantes. Her articles have appeared in various collective books, exhibition catalogs and international journals (
Art History ,
Feminist Review ,
Kritische Berichte ,
Multitudes ,
Oxford Art Journal ,
Parachute ,
Rue Descartes ,
Studi Culturali …).She is the author, with Alessandra Gribaldo, of
Lo schermo del potere. Femminismo e regime della visibilità (Ombre Corte, 2012) and recently edited and prefaced the French translation of Carla Lonzi’s
Autoportrait (JRP Ringier, Paris, 2012). Her research focuses on the relationship between gender and modernity in the visual arts, the politics of the archive in contemporary art, feminist theories of the visual and art and culture in Italy in the 1960s-1970s. Giovanna Zapperi’s research project for Villa Medici focuses on Carla Lonzi, a central figure of Italian feminism in the 1970s and a pioneering art critic in the 1960s. A former student of Roberto Longhi and author of a large number of critical texts with an undisciplined spirit, Lonzi invented an openly subjective style of writing about art, culminating in her book
Autoportrait (1969), based on transcriptions of interviews with artists. This research focuses on Carla Lonzi’s divergent trajectory, abandoning art criticism for feminism, in order to interrogate the relationship between creative practice and feminist commitment by situating them in the historical and artistic context of the 1960s-1970s.