Reimagining Art Practice, Recasting Myths: The Story of Two Groups of Feminist Artists in Southern Italy in the Late 1970s

This chapter explores collective feminist practices of resistance in aesthetics and signs of women’s autonomous artistic production within the Italian socio-political context of the 1970s. Starting from a brief analysis of the first published research on the presence of women in the field of artistic production in Italy, I will retrace the particular story of some feminist artists and intellectuals from Naples who decided to face both their own existential and professional condition by working together, forming the Gruppo XX and soon after the Gruppo Donne/Immagine/Creatività. This chapter aims to contribute to the broader academic interest in reassembling a genealogy of subjectivities that produced original cultural materials following unexplored trajectories whose experiences have been omitted for decades from the official narrative.