Carla Lonzi, Autoritratto, 2024

“At a certain point, I felt the work of art as a possibility for encounter. What remains now that I have lost this role within art? Have I perhaps become an artist? I can answer: I am no longer an outsider.” With this reflection, in 1969 Carla Lonzi was ready to catapult Self-Portrait into the galaxy of Italian art criticism, attributing to her asteroid-like book properties we associate with objects from another space, another plane: the wonder of discovery, the fascination with something whose contours are not immediately clear, but which will have profound repercussions not only on the way we understand art criticism, but also on the dialogue between people engaged in reflecting on the meaning of their work, like the artists featured in the book. The goal, in a writing that insists on being free from the typical cultural codes by which we attribute value to things, is to establish a point of contact oriented towards authenticity, trying to get as close as possible to a moment of light in one’s inner life.

Self-Portrait is a fundamental book for how to write about art, but it is also the preamble to the practice of listening that would revolutionize Carla Lonzi’s feminism and represents an invaluable document for those who wish to explore the contact zone where theory, dissolved into something new, also becomes literature.