Domestic Space and Performative Action in Experimental Filmmaking

The text analyzes the filmic experimentation of artists Marisa Merz, Marinella Pirelli, and Renata Boero, in relation to the domestic dimension and the relationship that their research fosters between artistic practice and experience, between the moving image and the temporalization of pictorial and sculptural experience. The exploration of their experimental film production, created between the 1960s and 1970s, allows us to address multiple issues related to militancy, strategies of self-affirmation and repositioning of the gaze, the ambiguous status of materials that blur the boundaries between performance documentation and experimentation, as well as the practice of the Archive as a non-linear investigative perspective. In various ways, in the research of Marisa Merz, Marinella Pirelli, and Renata Boero, domesticity becomes the site for re-signifying a different vision of subjectivity and artistry, a space for self-affirmation and radical pre-feminist experimentalism.