Irene Pittatore is a multifaceted artist with an inquisitive approach to the intricate relation between art, gender, identity and socio-economic dynamics. She uses photography, performance, writing and the spoken word to reflect and expose social imbalances and its symptoms, including homelessness and poverty.
Q > Observing and questioning our surroundings — tell us how has your work evolved over time and which themes you pursue?
A > In Italian, we use the same word — “verso” — to indicate the sound an animal makes and the poetic verse. My first works emerged from inner, hidden verses. Growls, brays translated and betrayed in metric ordering units. Like many women without solid tradition in feminist theories and practices, I grew up in the progressive unravelling of oppression, asymmetries of opportunities and expectations, prescriptiveness of the language.
I have sought alliances, engaged in battles for individuation, for a shared and stray education, dealing with one’s own nature, passing through self-representation and an anatomical coring of the language that many female artists and writers have attempted through photography, performance and narration.
Over time, the relationship has become a subject and a method of work. The body has manifested itself as an archive of sediments, being able to become memories or not: deposits that structure gaits, gestures, postures, limps, with which it is essential to come to terms.
Q > What’s the most satisfying part of the creative process?
A > Studying, shifting the gaze and the boundaries of one’s certainties, seeing imaginaries move, freeing one’s own strength and voice, urging people to do the same.
For me, photography, performance and words never cease to be a symptom before being a trace, an instrument of emancipation, a working tool, a decoy, an aggregation device, a medium to be forced, a poetic precipitate, a vector of action.
Q > Could you give us an overview of your project ‘homeless heroines’, and tell us what impact/reactions do you expect your work to provoke on your viewers?
A > homeless heroines is an artistic project conceived together with Virginia Ruth Cerqua for Cooperativa Animazione Valdocco, a very active social institution that provides care for people at risk of exclusion from economic and social life. ‘homeless heroines’ is the result of a two-year journey dedicated to creating spaces for narration and representation for homeless women. Relying on their own strength only, 12 women of different origins and ages overcome adverse life circumstances on the street or in shelters. These narratives have brought to life unprecedented figures: heroines, saints and vulnerable, tenacious warriors who point to horizons of redemption, imagination and emancipation. A proposal for civic reflection that is extremely urgent in contemporary urban contexts. I hope the project will generate in those who encounter it the same effect that working with these women has produced in the authors: a reversal of stereotypes of marginality and weakness. An opportunity for inspiration coming from the margins, from the invisible, an example of the exercise of strength, intelligence, resistance, the enactment of radical forms of solidarity.
Q > Misrepresented communities — tell us about an empowering story you refuse to forget.
A > In my work I encounter many impressive stories. A recent one: when we entered her room, on Elena’s bedside table was Gombrich’s The Story of Art. She was a homeless woman I met in Casa Sidoli, a support service for adult women offered by the City of Turin. While living on the street, she collected money to buy a Regional Museum Pass. With the pass, she could find shelter in many museums of her city, warm up, use the toilet. She visited all the exhibitions she had not been able to see when she was working. We talked at length about her passion for Matisse.
Q > Which conventions and practices do you think need to be disrupted, challenged or changed in order to support people experiencing homelessness?
A > In Turin, two months ago, the police forcibly evicted homeless people from the city centre, throwing away their blankets, cardboard boxes and confiscating their dogs. This was due to the introduction of a total ban on the use of any animal species for begging. There is a concern to protect the image of Turin as a proper city, as a tourist destination. And above all, there is an ongoing process of blaming, if not criminalising, poverty. I don’t have any ready-made solutions, but I think this is not a good way of approaching the problem.
Some inspiring proposals from the art and social world: the Rethink Homelessness Campaign to dispel homeless stereotypes, the work of The streets barber that gives free haircuts to homeless people, the We are all homeless art project by Willie Baronet, buying and collecting signs from people on the streets since 1993, Little Homeless Homes by Gregory Kloehn, which transforms discarded materials into small shelters, Michael Rakowitz’s paraSITE, an inflatable shelter system that attach to the exterior outtake vents of a building’s heating, as well as Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicle, which can be extended to provide sleeping, washing, and toilet facilities as well as a can-storage compartment. These proposals were analysed by curator Lisa Parola at the preview of homeless heroines at the Macro Museum in Rome.
Q > How can artistic intervention help us explore activist causes?
A > In my opinion art does not and should not have a “function”. It certainly plays a role in the observation, elaboration, sedimentation and spreading of thought of our time. It can highlight emergencies, shake up our imaginaries, denounce abuses through sound, visual, performative incursion in the traditional and independent art spaces as well as online or in the public sphere, through material works or immaterial interventions, non-linear, non-narrative actions. Besides museum spaces, my artistic practice has infiltrated universities, festivals, social and health centres for addictions or disabilities and recently also digital contexts of education and cultural production. Transformative dialogues start from clothes as receptors of desires and impositions, from hair as organic tissues of connection and manifestation of cultural identities, from the representation of bodies and forms of desire as tools of awareness, knowledge, fight against exclusion and discrimination.
Q > Debates around the Social Fabric — tell us about your project ‘YOU AS ME / In someone else’s shoes’, and tell us which reactions, questions do you hope to ignite?
A > Clothes reveal and codify social roles, belonging, identity. YOU AS ME / In someone else’s shoes is an art project open to individuals and groups who wish to be portrayed in the clothes of others. It investigates and celebrates the vulnerability, the political and poetic potential of bodies that expose themselves to displacement and evade the prescriptiveness of roles, gender categories and status. Through workshops, public performances and photographic series, I am interested in trying to connect diverse cultural and social experiences — different abilities, generations, genders — realising fluid portraits in which people wear clothes and accessories manifesting different cultural roots and belongings. The creation of collective opportunities to discuss inclusion, disseminating images of less “normalised” bodies, can perhaps contribute to non-judgmental, non-discriminating exchange of experiences that seem wrong, “unnatural”, just because they are unfamiliar.
Q > Which things do you think the people around you often take for granted?
A > The accidental nature of privileges. The importance of education. No one can decide where to be born, under what social, economic and cultural conditions. No one can determine the colour of one’s skin, one’s gender identity or sexual preferences. We should consider how our lives are regulated by power relationships, being able to recognise the forms of oppression, in an intersectional perspective, in order to try to counter them.
Irene Pittatore (1979) is an artist and journalist based in Turin (Italy). She writes about contemporary art, feminism and gender identity, with an intersectional perspective. From 2015 to 2017 she was the art contributor for MW — First Gender Neutral Magazine and Playboy. For 15 years, she has also been carrying out projects of documentation and enhancement of heritage, archives and initiatives for public and private institutions.
In 2015, she co-founded Impasse, a cultural association which involves new stakeholders (such as including educational bodies, organisations committed to social inclusion, and academics in various fields) in contemporary art production. Through workshops and artistic projects, Impasse promotes the protection of workers’ rights in the arts and culture sector (R-set. Tools for cultural workers) and promoting its public and social dimensions. She is also part of the board of Comitato Emergenza Cultura Piemonte and Rete al femminile Torino.
