‘I did not Say or Mean ‘Warning’: Icons and Memory through the Museum Guide in Chiara Fumai's Premio Furla Performance at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia

The site-specific performance I did not Say or Mean ‘Warning’ took place at Venice’s Fondazione Querini Stampalia in 2013 as part of the ninth edition of the foundation’s high-profile prize for young artists, the Premio Furla. That year the prize was awarded to Chiara Fumai, the sole woman in a group of six nominated artists. Presented within the format of a guided tour, the performance deconstructed the standard docent script used to present the Querini-Stampalia collection of Renaissance paintings to visitors of its palace museum with extracts from interviews with militant women engaged in armed struggle in the 1970s when the leftist Red Brigades were active in Italy. The performance was offered to the public twenty times over the course of a month that coincided with the opening of the 55th Biennale di Arti Visive.

In the words of Fumai playing museum docent, the tour focused on “ghostly apparitions” and “spectral presences” of historical women in the collection’s paintings connected to portrayed figures by various degrees of likeness: painter Vincenzo Catena’s mistress Rosa da Scardona who, museum literature claims, was the model for his Giuditta (c. 1517); Nicolosia Bellini Mantegna—Giovanni Bellini’s sister and wife of Andrea Mantegna—allegedly portrayed in a figure who observes the presentation of the infant Jesus in Bellini’s 1469 painting of the biblical event at the Temple of Jerusalem; a 1694 portrait for Doge Silvestro Valier’s personal use showing Dogaressa Elisabetta Querini in a coronation prohibited by the Venetian Republic.

Through Fumai’s performance, the paper returns to Jack Greenstein’s 1997 article on the icon in semiotics which proposed to resolve philosophical issues of symmetry and regression in iconicity with a revised definition of icon that included the “cognitive priority of the object to the sign.” This definition of iconicity allows for a key question to emerge: why, in 2013, did a collective “cognitive priority” decide that a collection of paintings in the Querini-Stampalia collection should be thematized in relation to radical leftist political violence enacted by women? What is the relationship between "cognitive priority" and what Maurizio Lazzarato--referencing Felix Guattari--calls "asignifying semitotics"? What does Fumai’s meticulous mash-up of the docent tour with art historical interpretations interrupted with excerpts from Mara e le Altre (Mara and the Others, 1979) delivered in outbursts of sign language, say about icons and memory under computational capitalism at a political moment said to be described appropriating Gramsci’s words: the old is perpetually dying yet the new can never be born?