More than Talk: Performance of Witchcraft in the Practice of Chiara Fumai

In 2012, when performance artist Chiara Fumai performed excerpts of texts written by Italian art critic and radical feminist Carla Lonzi at the thirteenth edition of Germany’s important international quinquennial, documenta, she chose to do so as Zalumma Agra, the legendary Circassian beauty from Central Asia who was part of P.T. Barnum’s circus in the mid-19th century. Many women had been recruited to play the part of this fictional character, whose carefully crafted story was based on the real trauma of ethnic cleansing and forced migration of Circassians from the North Caucasus by the Russian Empire. In the period of the Emancipation Proclamation issued in the United States in 1863 to 'free' Black slaves in the Southern secessionist states, the enslavement of Circassian women and their sale in Ottoman markets—referred to as “’white’ slavery”—was a source of fascination and fear among white Americans that Barnum’s circus played upon. Presented in Kassel from the heights over the Fridericianum’s imposing pediment, among fire-breathers and statues of allegorical female figures representing architecture, philosophy, painting, sculpture, history and astronomy, Shut Up. Actually, Talk (The World Will Not Explode, 2012) was more than “talk”: it was a deculturalization of the white female body gutted of living corporeality for symbolic use as allegory representing ideas, concepts, disciplines, nations--all founded on the global idea of race. The feminist Lonzi, who withdrew from writing art criticism in the conviction that art “represented the ‘highest stage of consciousness’ reached by male culture” had asked, “what remains, now that I have lost the role of art critic? Have I perhaps become an artist?” In Fumai’s performance, Lonzi finally found the very “alternative creativity” she sought when she left art for activism, and she found it in her own manifestos. She became an artist but one of a very different type than that proposed by male culture. Circus act Zalumma Agra, the ‘fake’ made to represent a real story of trauma that was, however not her own—and in silence, not allowed to speak—found a voice in Lonzi’s texts. Fumai used the memory of the anonymous multitude employed to play the ‘white slave,’ to give the metaphorical neo-classical white stone women of allegory on the roof of one of Europe’s first museums, back their flesh in a manner that could not be anticipated by Lonzi, who did not address raciality. The presentation discusses Fumai's work with "witchcraft" in relation to Lonzi's concept of "deculturalization."