Conception, creation, installation Maria Federica Maestri
Co-created performer (in order of action) Monica Barone, Carlotta Spaggiari, Valentina Barbarini, Tiziana Cappella
Visual Refractions Francesco Pititto
'What role does pain play in your work?
What role? Here…I am crossed by all external stimuli of violence…
in partitions I no longer question the body, I no longer question it, I listen to it(…)’.
From an interview by Lea Vergine with Gina Pane (1985)
‘Over Gina Pane_4 Sentimental Actions’ is a performative creation in which the bitter and harsh beauty pursued by Gina Pane in her irreducible artistic practice, takes the embodied and disturbing form of the four performers: injured bodies, disaster bodies, martyr bodies, bodies saints who survived the nothingness of pain.
In close poetic and formal concatenation with the radicality of Gina Pane this iconostasis of Lenz becomes an affective and poetic mirroring of the extreme actions of the wound artist, ‘without lulling us into his memory, but trying to be reborn in the oxidized drops of his bleeding footprints’.
‘Over Gina Pane’ takes place-life at the center of the images-Remarks, created during Pane's 1973 performance which took place at the Milanese Diagramma gallery, entitled ‘Sentimental Action’, in which the artist's actions metaphorized female pain as an expression of love for humanity and Nature.
The religious symbolism of the torn body as a gift and of the wound as a multiplication of sensory capacity are elements of great germinative power in the training and artistic practice of Masters, whose 4 Sentimental Actions they return as the fruit of an inspiration, in an echo that is not radial, but multifaceted.
The symmetry between Gina Pane's research on the body of saints, characteristic of the last phase of the ‘Partition’ (works inspired by Saint Francis, Saint Lawrence, Saint Peter, Saint Martin, Saint John) and the body-martyr of the four interpreters returns to the present, in a pulsating conceptual reversal, in a process of identity transposition - Saint Apollonia, Saint Dymphna, Saint Agatha, Egyptian Saint Mary - the real physics of physical and emotional wounds.
The installation rereading of the saints by Pane is transmuted, in the iconostasis of Masters in performative revival, ‘Via Dolorosa’ (title of a work by Pane from 1988) to travel ‘here and now’ to reunite through the truth of their own poetic and existential lesions to the aesthetic and political thought of the artist.
Learn more about creation: Over Gina Pane_4 Sentimental Actions
The performance creation will be carried out within the Ex Corpo seminar, a project curated by Prof. Maria Cristina Galli (Artistic Anatomy) and Prof. Pasquale Polidori (Painting Techniques), which will take place in the Napoleonic Hall of the Brera Academy on January 28, 2026 and will feature: Giovanna Frene, Lenz Fondazione, Cesare Pietroiusti, Andrea Pinotti, Silvia Riva, Michele Zaffarano.
The seminar is preceded and introduced by a workshop program aimed at Brera students, which will take place between October 2025 and January 2026.
Learn more about the Brera Academy's seminar project: Ex Corpo
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