The photo book: a space for feminist action
Symposium

June 4, 18:00-20:00. Bologna
Centro Documentazione Donne

Within the cycle
Photobook. Feminist Dialogues
Meetings and events on the photobook as an artistic and photographic practice by women
by Biblioteca italiana delle Donne

With Giorgia Basch, Director of BilderAtlas
Sonia Lenzi, visual artist 
Anna Pramstrahler, Head of the Italian Women’s Library at CDD
Elda Guerra, historian and part of Associazione Orlando

Part of our programme Styles of radical will

Program

We are pleased to invite you to a seminar at the Biblioteca Italiana delle donne, one of the most important libraries specialising in women’s culture, gender studies and feminism in Italy, which has a collection of over 30,000 volumes and 495 periodicals. The library is located at the Centro Documentazione Donne, a public space that realises and promotes activities related to the women’s and transgender movement.

The photobook is a space rich in creative potential, and a site of political action. It is precisely for this reason that over the last fifty years it has established itself as a prominent object in feminist artistic and curatorial practice. But what are the characteristics that make the photo book such a powerful vehicle for feminism? In this seminar we will try to trace the reasons why the book object – as much now as in the 1970s – continues to be an effective means of communication, action and reactivation of photographic materials for women artists, and more broadly for the Women’s Rights Movement.

Mobile, widespread, averagely inexpensive within an art world increasingly tied to the monetary value of artworks, and existing in multiple copies, thus escaping the notion of uniqueness in terms of value and taste: the photo book can travel and become part of our daily lives.

We will then question what are the characteristics that make a photo book feminist, looking beyond the themes to shift our gaze to the forms, the aesthetics, and the working practices that we share.

The seminar draws on a network of women who come together to discuss this multifaceted topic that is still scarcely addressed in Italy. 

Free admission.

Bibi Tomasi, Al cerchio delle tue mani. © BilderAtlas