ZIG ZAG ZEG ZUG

Solo show by Gruppo operaio ’E Zezi and Marinella Senatore
curated by LAVERONICA Arte Contemporanea
19 August – 8 December 2018

Proloco #1
ZIG ZAG ZEG ZUG
The ‘E Zezi and Marinella Senatore Workers’ Group

How important can the area of origin be in the work of an artist?

Let-downs are always just around the corner. Despite the fact that in artists’ passports there is just an much of the exotic as the art world demands, and although they might tell us stories that range from the Middle East to Cuba via South Africa, these stories are at times pieced together from within the comfort of a family flat in London’s East End, or dreamt up in some cool New York apartment.

Members of the ‘E Zezi and Marinella Senatore Workers’ Group come from Pomigliano D’Arco and from Cava de’ Tirreni: towns in the Campania region of the South, poor and with an agricultural tradition yet which only a few years ago proved unable to escape from the perverse arrival of modernity, with all its industrial illusions.

On second thoughts, at the start, ‘E Zezi and Marinella Senatore didn’t really have anything exotic to offer the art world, although there were other things to offer the world around them: few and simple words which – although in contemporary society may seem outdated – in the art world are nothing short of unknown: the social class they belonged to.

How important can it be in art to have had any real experience of the stories that are told?

The Zezi first emerged in the 1970s in the Alfasud factory in Pomigliano D’Arco. They were factory workers, students, teachers and the unemployed. For years, they simply told the stories of their lives. Stories of factories, of labour and of struggles against exploitation. They made music, theatre and the visual arts. An open collective that, over the years, more than three-hundred and fifty people passed through.

In an era in which, in Italy, ferocious company managers can become national heroes, the ‘E Zezi Workers’ Group is not archaeology of the workers’ movement, but represents one of its last pockets of resistance.

Marinella Senatore is the daughter of a post office employee and a primary school teacher. Thanks to her father, from a very tender age she experienced the world of political militancy to the point – as a cinema student – of joining the No Global demonstrations at the G8 in Genoa in 2001. In the face of institutional violence, she had to lower her film camera. She lived through the defeat of her generation and decided from that moment on that her only means of action in the world would be art. Over the years she has done all she can to tell her own stories to factory workers, students, housewives, and all those who have decided to contribute to the creation of her great participatory projects.

Text by Corrado Gugliotta