Francesca Grilli, Loredana Longo, Marzia Migliora, Rosy Rox, Marinella Senatore : Language is a Virus

Language is a Virus is an open-air exhibition curated by Adriana Rispoli for the Italian Cultural Institute C.M. Lerici in Stockholm during the Covid19 emergency. 

As a response to the suspension of all the activities, art pursues its continuous dialogue with life by experimenting new expressive formats that can be enjoyed by the public. Language is a Virus uses advertising posters as technique and Stockholm’s streets as exhibition space. Although Sweden decided not to put restrictions as in Italy, cultural places such as museums, galleries and theaters have been closed to the public. In this moment of forced isolation, the city offers a space for communication to five Italian female artists: Francesca Grilli, Loredana Longo, Marzia Migliora, Rosy Rox and Marinella Senatore. The real urban space – not merely a virtual one - is used as an organized place where it is possible to communicate beyond domestic walls and geographical borders. At the same time, the advertising posters become an artistic medium with several sociological and psychological implications. In the urban environment, art retain its autonomy and generates relationships: the art’s space is the space of freedom. Thus, the recipient is no longer a consumer but an active user.

Language is a Virus is named after a song by Laurie Anderson, one of the greatest and most eclectic artists of our time. In this performance-track from 1986, she quoted William Burroughs’s words: “the most dangerous virus was language.” The Institute’s “exhibition” wants to point out both the liberating power of the verbal and visual language and its subversive ability to appropriate the poster, that Marshall McLuhan would consider a cold medium. The purpose of this exhibition is to capture the attention of the passer-byes when they casually roam on the streets. It aims to stimulate a reflection on this particular moment we are living in, a moment of social isolation, and a moment when the domestic burden seems to fall almost exclusively on its female component. Women are asked to be workers, but also daughters, mothers, teachers, cooks, servants. The choice to involve five female artists wants to reply to this female condition and as much as an opportunity of discussion.

Swedish capital city billboards become the exhibition supports, used by the artists to communicate their messages linked to their personal researches: from Francesca Grilli’s question Can you transform the invisible into the visible? to Happy Days by Marzia Migliora, The Hope still Lives and the Dream shall never die by Loredana Longo and Agile performed by Rosy Rox, finally Stay Woke shouted by Marinella Senatore.

Subverting the classical canon of the public-private binomial, an imperative of the suspended time we are living, these artists transform the street of Stockholm in an obliged museum, as the Italian art critic Achille Bonito Oliva would say. Language is a Virus is an answer to the need of freedom and communication researched both by art and women. It aims to overthrow the relationship between public and private and to discard women’s potentially passive condition during this forced isolation.

For more information, please visit the Institute’s website