Shut Up. Or Rather, Speak

Taci, anzi parla (Shut Up. Or Rather, Speak) – part of the solo show Velme, curated by Beatrice Merz at Cà Rezzonico Museo del Settecento Veneziano in Venice – is an installation inspired by Pietro Longhi’s painting Il Rinoceronte (The Rhinoceros, 1751) —housed in Cà Rezzonico —in which a lady wears a mask of the era, for female use only, called a moréta or mute servant girl: a black oval with two eyeholes. This mask could only be secured over the face by clenching a muzzle between one’s teeth, thus forcing the women who wore it to keep silent. The artist reproduces it from a cast of her own face and places it at the visitor’s eye level in a transparent display case installed in the boudoir of Ca’ Rezzonico—reserved for women in the eighteenth century—to also show the back, which is typically hidden, highlighting the condition of silence imposed on women over centuries of patriarchy. The title quotes the book Taci anzi parla: Diario di una femminista (Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978) by Carla Lonzi, a theorist of Italian radical feminism.