MATERIAL VOICES 8: UNA CERTA ROMA. WITH SUSANA TALAYERO AND JACOPO BENCI

Una certa Roma is the eighth session of Material Voices: Feminist genealogies of the work of making exhibitions. With Susana Talayero and Jacopo Benci.

UNA CERTA ROMA

Monday, 5 May, 2025
18:30-19:00: “Outside the frame: rethinking the 1980s Rome art scene”. By Jacopo Benci.
19:00-19:30: “Un fondo blanco que nunca estuvo limpio” (A white background that was never clean). By Susana Talayero.

SUSANA TALAYERO: UN FONDO BLANCO QUE NUNCA ESTUVO LIMPIO
Exhibition open to the public:
Thursday to Saturday, 5 May – 14 June, 2025.
From 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm.

MATERIAL VOICES 8: UNA CERTA ROMA
“Genealogy”, the term we have chosen to articulate this program that began in 2021, points to the links between practices – and artists – from different moments in time, establishing a hierarchy or temporal relationship between predecessors and continuers. For its part, the expression “artistic scene” is defined by a spatial reference. Thus, as occurs with the characters who enter and leave the stage in a play, the place is the element uniting the protagonists of an artistic scene in a given period.  

That place is generally a city, in this case, Rome. Susana Talayero has on occasion talked to us about a scene of which she formed part during a decade and with which she still maintains affective ties. We have invited Susana Talayero and Jacopo Benci, another participant in the Roman artistic scene, to tell us about those years and help us to understand certain interlinked, peripheral and less evident genealogies.

SUSANA TALAYERO: UN FONDO BLANCO QUE NUNCA ESTUVO LIMPIO
Revisiting, remaking. Moving things. 1986-1987-1988-1989-1990-1991-1992-1993-1994-1995-1996, Rome. Alla Romana infrahistory: without a program, experimenting, foreigners, undergrounds, squares. Paint, making a way of life, making life worlds.

At Bulegoa z/b I present the paintings Equilibrio precario (1988), 4 cani per strada (1991) and the drawings Retratos (1991), all of which were made in two studios loaned to me in Rome: a ruined building and the basement of a palazzo. I also present the video Un taglio nello spazio (2024), an intersection between my own photographic archive and two actions which I carried out – in 2021 and 2023 – in that place of initiation and memory: Rome. 

Making it possible to listen to the crude and euphoric logic of the material; working with the archive, altering it; playing that this world exists, resisting. 

JACOPO BENCI: OUTSIDE THE FRAME: RETHINKING THE 1980s ROME ART SCENE
In the 1980s, the Rome art scene was largely defined by Postmodernist architecture, championed by Paolo Portoghesi and Transavanguardia, and theorized by Achille Bonito Oliva, which dovetailed with the consumerist ‘second Italian boom’ under Bettino Craxi’s Socialist Party, backed by Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire. Yet beyond this ‘inside the frame’ consensus, a parallel circuit of artists – several of them foreigners – pursued alternative languages and networks. The talk juxtaposes these margins with the canonized centre, revealing a more plural and vibrant art scene than standard reconstructions of the decade have typically allowed.

BIOGRAPHIES

Jacopo Benci is a Rome-based visual artist who works across media and has exhibited in Italy and abroad since 1984. Since 2003 he has been active in the field of cultural/visual studies, with peer-reviewed publications and lectures on Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Luigi Ghirri. He has also lectured on Italian cinema, landscape photography and radical architecture. He was Assistant Director Fine Arts (1998-2013) and Senior Research Fellow in Modern Studies & Contemporary Visual Culture (2013-18) at the British School in Rome. He currently teaches at the Istituto Europeo di Design, Rome. www.vimeo.com/user2876122

Susana Talayero (Bilbao, 1961) After graduating in Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), she moved to Rome, where she lived for 10 years. After returning to Bilbao in 1996,   her work in the field of painting and drawing was extended to making video experiments. Her current practice explores the relation between painting and space through large-scale accumulative montages. In 3 acciones corsarias, a work in progress, she explores the relation between painting, the body and locations linked to her autobiography in Rome. Her recent shows include: Meteora (2024) at CarrerasMugica, Bilbao; Relatos de entrenamiento at CAB, Burgos (2018); Una certa organizzazione delle cose, at AOC F58, Rome (2017) and Crónica inquieta 1986-2016, at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum (2016). In 2023, she received the Gure Artea prize in recognition of her artistic career.