FUTURISTE

La sperimentazione parolibera

delle donne del futurismo

1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.

2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.

3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber.

We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double

march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.

With this first statement in 1909 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti open his first Manifesto of Futurism. From these first words starts the “Life and Art” movement lasted until the early 40’s. But if when think about the Futurism we imagine a pure male movement. Especially if we think about graphic verbo-iconic experimentation we imagine a group of male artists. It’s in fact a common opinion, given the scarcity of documentation, that women who adhered to the movement were interested just in painting, dance and theater, but that few of them had then embarked on the path of graphic experimentation on the page, on manifestos and on newspapers.

On the contrary, this volume is focused mainly on female early graphic designers who decided to subscribe to the movement to start a personal path of research in verbo-visual experimentation. In a context in which art and life come together in a single continuous and insatiable moment, the Futurist women have made the avant-garde a matrix of renewal that is not only aesthetic, but more profoundly social and cultural, opening up the italian public visual and social culture.