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Manifesto of Futurist Woman (Let's Conclude)
(color video with sound, 11 min. 13 sec., 2008)
Manifest of Futurist Woman (Let's Conclude) depicts a group of majorettes marching across an urban space, apparently performing a generic choreography. However, the majorettes, instead of following the usual terpsichore, actually broadcast a message coded in Semaphore, an old-fashioned signal language. Semaphore is a system of conveying information at a distance by means of visual signals with hand-held flags, disks or hands. Information is encoded by the position of flags, and is read when these are in fixed positions. It was invented in the 19th century and widely used in the maritime world. Nowadays, due to the spread of radio and satellite technologies, Semaphore is dying out, but is still used for emergency communication.
The phenomenon of majorettes, groups of girls dressed in quasi military sexy uniforms marching during parades, is an atavism from early 1900's, the times when modernistic canons infiltrated popular culture. Consisting of synchronized movements of female bodies and skillful baton twirling, this human ornament is a sexually loaded spectacle and a favoured decoration of public festivities. This savoury (visual as well as terminological) derivate of male military practices is a celebration of mass and a sublimation of its taste and desires.
The message performed by the majorettes in the video is the concluding part of Manifesto della donna futurista, written in 1912 by the French poet, playwright and performance artist Valentine de Saint-Point as a response to Marinetti's infamous call, in the 1909 Manifesto del Futurismo, for the 'scorn of woman'. Saint Point's manifesto porposed a strong woman as a role model who would re-appropriate her instincts and vital strength in spite of a society which condemned her to weakness. Saint-Point desires "to annihilate the categories of men and women, the bipolar subdivision that predisposes a master/slave dialectic. Yet she recognizes that futurism is right. Its emphasis on force, on strength, and on destruction of the past fits within the female futurist's worldview. [...] Like male futurists, de Saint-Point follows the heroes, becoming warrior or nurse [...] She must create children, not only for herself but as warriors for the nation. In effect, de Saint-Point here attempts at times to break from the female stereotypes, but ultimately succumbs to Marinetti's virile porpaganda. She tries to inscribe female futurism within the male paradigm." (Clara Orban, Women, Futurism and Fascism in Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, published by U of Minnesota Press, 1995). The militancy of many women in the Futurist movement was characterized by contradiction. On one hand, women were encouraged to make use of their potential as mothers of soldiers and of male citizens, whilst at the same time they struggled to continue developing their professional, social, political and artistic vocations, a struggle that was in constant danger of having to submit to the increasingly hostile and normalising values of the Fascist regime.
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