Sguardo rovescio, curated by Cristiana Perrella and Elena Magini, is the first major exhibition dedicated by an Italian museum to Marialba Russo. Born in Giugliano (Naples) in 1947, Russo is among the artists who, from the late 1960s onwards, helped redefine the language of photography in Italy, bringing together artistic practice, visual anthropology and an observation of society.
The exhibition brings together seven key bodies of work from her practice: Al ristorante, il 29 settembre 1974 (1974); Travestimento (1975–80); Il Passaggio – l’incanata (1979); Il Parto (1978); Della serie delle centotrenta figure di spalle (1981); Cult Fiction (1978–80); and L’espulsione del male (1974). Together, they reveal the complexity of a practice that anticipated themes now central to contemporary debate, including the body, gender, ritual and the cultural construction of identity.
The title Sguardo rovescio refers to the reversal operated by Marialba Russo in relation to the canonical viewpoint of an Italy that was still deeply patriarchal: “another experience of looking”, in Russo’s own words, which unsettles the conventions of photography at the time, questioning the representation of masculinity from a woman artist’s perspective and offering an alternative, autonomous and original vision of a reality largely narrated through the male gaze.
This reversal naturally engages with the notion of the male gaze developed by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey, generally used to describe the ways in which men have objectified the female body through the camera, simply reversing its direction: here, a female eye scrutinises, isolates and captures masculinity in a single frame as a multifaceted cultural construct, rather than as a natural given.
The male figures represented by Marialba Russo challenge the stereotype of virility by portraying men who surrender themselves to the event, relinquishing control or restraint; figures in disguise, subversive figures, or figures stripped of their individualism.
The photographs in the exhibition reveal two distinct approaches to the represented subject. On the one hand, there is a taxonomic and repetitive, descriptive mode that recalls at times the conventions of street photography and at others those of portraiture. On the other, there is a narrative mode that instead constructs a sequence, a visual account capable of capturing eccentric moments of extraordinary vitality.
The project at MACRO, which also includes an installation from the artist’s Personal Archive, unfolds in dialogue with a second venue for the exhibition at MUCIV – Museo delle Civiltà.
Titled Immagini della Madonna dell’Arco (After) and curated by Cristiana Perrella, Elena Magini, Andrea Viliani and Francesca Romana Uccella, the exhibition at MUCIV focuses on the fieldwork Russo carried out in 1971, which led to a collaboration between 1972 and 1977 with the then Museo Nazionale delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari, as part of research campaigns on Italian popular and subaltern cultures coordinated by anthropologist Annabella Rossi.
THE EXHIBITED WORKS
Al ristorante, il 29 settembre 1974, 1974
The photographic sequence shows an improvised event, a dance in a restaurant between two young men from the Sanctuary of the Madonna di Monteverde, an ancient place of worship in the Murgia Materana park. The subjects are captured in a moment of liveliness and ambiguity, as they engage in a dance with an erotic flavor. The succession of images tells of the abandonment of the bodies in the dance, the absence of control and restraint in their gestures, the freedom granted by the physical closeness that develops between the subjects. Here, as in other series, Russo's interest is clear in capturing, within the festival, the moment when people free themselves from the rules that bind them in everyday life. Al ristorante, il 29 settembre 1974 opens the series I Quaderni dello Sguardo (The Notebooks of the Gaze), conceived by the artist herself: a self-produced book printed clandestinely in Torre Annunziata, using a machine for printing preserve-jar labels, in order to escape the censorship of publishers of the time.
Travestimento, 1975-80
The series Travestimento (Disguise) originates from a project carried out between 1975 and 1980 in Campania (Avellino, Benevento, Naples, Salerno): 34 photographs portraying the culture of cross-dressing typical of carnival festivities in Southern Italy. Departing from social-documentary reportage, the work sits on the boundary between observation of the ritual and artistic project: Russo portrays, in close-up, men dressed and made up as women, in a ritual that for one day overturns roles, freeing the population from everyday rules. In wearing women's clothes, the men portrayed imperceptibly take on the condition of women in language, manners, and gestures. A representation of the feminine constructed "by proximity": the subjects interpret womanhood through an image mediated by sisters, wives, mothers. This profane masquerade has its roots in ancient rites born to reconnect the opposite polarities of masculine and feminine, in an ideal overcoming of gender.
Il Passaggio – l'incanata, 1979
Il Passaggio – l'incanata (The Passage – the Incanata) is a 1979 photographic series set on a mountain in the Avellino area, on the border with Basilicata. The “incanata” is a rite of initiation and healing from southern Italian folk tradition, often used to cure and prevent infant hernias. The images do not merely document the rite but bring out a slow, almost timeless action that binds men and nature in an initiatory ritual connected to the cycle of birth and rebirth. The title Il Passaggio (The Passage) alludes precisely to this threshold: a passage between states, illness and healing, initiation and belonging, which Russo's photography crosses without ever reducing it to a simple chronicle of the event. The rite of passage, physical and symbolic, connects the human and the vegetal, creating a parallel between the physical wound and the split made in the tree, which is also later mended and "healed." The child's passage through the tree is accompanied by officiants who simulate the exit from the maternal womb with cries: a ritual that also marks the passage to adulthood and to a virility that is collectively assumed and confirmed.
Il Parto, 1978
Il Parto (The Birth) brings together twelve photographs, some in black and white and some in color, that capture a carnivalesque and festive moment from Southern Italy: a man in disguise simulating childbirth, amid convulsions, screams, and theatrical gestures reminiscent of the popular register of the sceneggiata. The images, which Russo shoots in close-up, are agitated and fragmented, conveying the disruptive physicality of the scene: the body in torsion, the exasperated expressions, an almost grotesque crescendo that the artist manages to capture as it unfolds, up to the final unveiling of the masquerade, when the fictional nature of the event becomes entirely explicit. The male body here lends itself to a parodic and playful appropriation of one of the experiences historically and culturally tied to the feminine, through the gesture and mimicry of pain.
Il Parto is the photographic sequence with which, in 1979, Marialba Russo represented Italy at "Venezia '79. La fotografia," in the section "Fotografia Europea Contemporanea," curated by Daniela Palazzoli, Sue Davis, and Jean-Claude Lemagny.
Della serie delle centotrenta figure di spalle, 1981
Della serie delle centotrenta figure di spalle (From the series of the one hundred and thirty figures seen from behind) brings together one hundred and thirty portraits of men photographed from behind, in an operation that pushes to its furthest consequences the research on the human figure that Russo had begun in the previous decade. The gender of the subjects is never in doubt — the men's clothing makes this clear — but individual identity is what is withheld: deprived of their faces, the men portrayed remain recognizable as such while being entirely anonymous, distinguishable from one another only by posture and dress, clues that hint at diverse origins and social backgrounds. The taxonomic seriality of the project, almost a catalogue of backs and napes, clothes and hats, transforms repetition into a critical device. The more the images accumulate, the more a collective portrait of masculinity emerges: plural, unequal in its social composition, lacking a single, stable identity.
Cult Fiction, 1978-80
Cult Fiction gathers a photographic series dedicated to posters for pornographic films that appeared on the streets of Naples and Aversa between March 1978 and December 1980, the years in which Italy saw the opening of the first cinemas specializing in the genre. Unlike the other series in the exhibition, here Russo does not photograph men but sexual desire (male and heterosexual), within a context of shifting social mores and an increasingly explicit representation of sex that characterized 1970s Italy. Shifting the gaze from the human body to the image of the body — the poster, the billboard, the street as a public space of consumption — Russo documents, with an almost collector's spirit, an entirely male imaginary, in which the female figure appears as an object of possession: the posters, often grotesque in their titles and images, make public and commodify the representation of women's bodies.
The series thus tells of a twofold movement typical of those years: on one hand, the push toward greater sexual freedom, also enacted by women, and on the other, a new market of images that, by openly displaying bodies and desire, produces and publicly disseminates an objectified image of the female body, reduced to visual merchandise.
L’espulsione del male, 1974
L'espulsione del male (The Expulsion of Evil) brings together four photographs taken in Galatina, a place historically linked to tarantism and to the Chapel of San Paolo, where the "tarantate" once went to free themselves, through music and dance, from the symbolic spider bite. The work draws on the collaboration between Russo and the anthropologist Annabella Rossi and her field research into the folk culture and healing rites of Southern Italy. Unlike the tradition, in which the protagonists are almost exclusively women, Russo photographs a man on the ground, captured at the culminating moment of the rite, the moment when evil is expelled from the body. The strong chiaroscuro running through the images heightens the dramatic, almost theatrical dimension of the scene, isolating the figure from its context and lending it the solemnity of sacred iconography. Masculinity is shown here at the moment of its most extreme vulnerability, a body on the ground, at the mercy of a force that must be fought and cast out, while at the same time being part of a collective ritual that spans tradition and religiosity.