Dentro e fuori l’autocoscienza. I fototesti di Rivolta Femminile

This article seeks to examine the photo-textual production of Rivolta Femminile, one of the earliest Italian feminist collectives, founded in 1970 by Carla Lonzi, Carla Accardi, and Elvira Banotti. It aims to elucidate how the intersection of verbal and visual languages becomes a constitutive and distinctive element of the group’s feminist praxis. The use of verbo-visual interaction—a prominent feature across much of the artistic and activist output of the 1970s—emerges as a defining characteristic of Rivolta Femminile’s work. Notably, approximately half of the “Libretti Verdi”, the eight foundational texts through which the group articulated its identity, deploy photo-textual strategies. Following an analysis of the two collective works È già politica (1977) and La presenza dell’uomo nel femminismo (1978), the discussion will focus specifically on La strada più lunga (1976) by Maria Grazia Chinese and Taci, anzi parla (1978) by Carla Lonzi—two diaries in which the use of photo-textual devices serves to articulate the ambivalent dimensions of feminist consciousness- raising and temporality.