LOVINGLY ARRANGED MULTIFORM FIGURES: MICHELA GHISETTI'S SERIES "CHE BAMBOLE!" - Nina Schedlmair

Trivets, bird feathers, boxing gloves. Rhinestone necklaces, lampshade frames, spotlights. Pipe cleaners, steamer inserts. Spiral binders, sink strainers, buttons, carved figurines. A multitude of baskets, calabashes, pompoms. And in the middle of it all, a stuffed heron stretches its beak into the air. A list of the materials employed by Michela Ghisetti to create her figures in the series “Che Bambole!” would go beyond the scope of this text. They are characterized by an almost endless variety of objects, deriving from the most different sources, and the way in which the artist combines them with one another amazes time and time again. Two sieves with black buttons stare inquisitively around the studio. A small calabash mimics a nose stretched upwards. Brooms become heads, two curved brushes form breasts, a birdcage turns into a torso. What is striking is the predominance of objects used in households, crafted by women and sold at markets, including objects worn by women as adornments. “I mainly use things that have passed through the hands of women,” says Michela Ghisetti, who has been working on the series since 2019.

Her work thus ties in with a tradition that reached its peak in the feminist art of the 1970s. For a long time, the canon devalued art related to women’s spheres of life as less interesting, a view that still persists to some extent (as can be seen in expressions like “women’s literature”). This is slowly changing with the re-evaluation of art from the past. In her 1975 performance “Semiotics of the Kitchen”, Martha Rosler used household appliances to form the alphabet. Birgit Jürgenssen strapped a stove to her hips and VALIE EXPORT had women pose with kitchen utensils alluding to sacred motifs. All of them are now firmly rooted in art history.

While many female artists at that time criticized the confinement of women to the role of housewife, Ghisetti is more concerned with the appreciation of lifeworlds associated with women. Some of the figures bear titles that refer to the names of specific women and in turn have additional meanings. For example, “Mali (an abundance of friends and love)” or “Kya (diamond in the sky)”. Nevertheless, the works are not intended as portraits. Yet each of them possesses a specific character, appearing proud or shy, cheerful or dignified.

Formally, the figures in “Che Bambole!” call to mind the composite heads of Arcimboldo (1526-1593). In them, fruits, wild animals, books and much more are arranged into portrait-like images, where the back of a bird becomes a nose, roots turn into hair or a cherry becomes a pupil. Arcimboldo himself drew on earlier models, presumably from antiquity, in Europe and Asia. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann noted that they can be found “in Armenian miniatures, Pompeian wall paintings, on ancient cameos and in the illustrations in the margin of medieval manuscripts”.₁₎ The idea of such hybrid creatures already existed in Pliny's “Naturalis Historia”. As claimed by Philipp Morel, the principle of composite heads originates in the rhetorical figure of metonymy, “according to which one thing is replaced by another thing that is related to it through spatial, temporal, causal or semantic proximity”. If metonymy settles for “a single bird, a single flower or a single fish”, its accumulation is more likely to lead to something that “in rhetoric is called a process of amplification, even a pleonasm, or better yet an asyndeton (a sequence without connection)”. This “method of asyndetic accumulation” nonetheless follows “a principle of arrangement”: for in order to form a face, one must rely on formal similarities [...] In very many cases, especially with hair, it is solely accumulation that replaces similarity.”

Thus, the works from the “Che Bambole!” series can also be seen as accumulated metonymies – whereby they open up broader contexts than Arcimboldo's composite heads. Their mode of accumulation is not based on similar objects. They are revalued, and each individual component refers to a context beyond itself, following the principle of collage.

A further dimension of Michela Ghisetti's assemblages relates to dolls. The title, “What a doll!” in English, refers to an Italian song (“Che Bambola!” by Fred Buscaglione) that, yet again, celebrates a beautiful woman. In colloquial language the term “doll” reduces women to pretty but passive beings. The cultural history of dolls is rich and full of projections. Pia Müller-Tamm and Katharina Sykora speak of the “projective openness of the doll” and its “allegorical referential power to something ‘other than itself’". In the past, the lifeless body of the doll was “perceived as a ‘fantasy catalyst’ and charged with a variety of meanings – with phantasms of the erotic, the magical or the destructive”, according to Müller-Tamm and Sykora.₂₎ The “seemingly innocent children's doll”, they claim, has “always carried the promise of other, unknown spheres as a projection surface and surrogate object (...). As an attribute of girlhood, it is charged with ideas of transience, of the lost paradises of childhood and of the illusory being associated with the feminine.”₃₎ Dolls, they argue, “lend themselves to being animated by the imagination of the user or viewer and then develop a magical, frightening, disturbing, disconcerting and unsettling effect”.₄₎

In contrast to most dolls, those by Michela Ghisetti are fragmented, openly admitting their fragmentation, which also distinguishes them from Arcimboldo's composite heads, which unite similar objects and merge into a large whole. In their fragmentary nature, they do not resist being animated by the imagination, yet they are far removed from the human body and break with the human likeness of traditional dolls. They are not a unity, but a diversity.

Another reference point for Ghisetti's works are fertility dolls as they were used in Ghana. The Akuaba doll, for example, is based on the story of a woman called Akua. A priest made a wooden doll with her help and performed rituals with it. After carrying this doll with her, Akua gave birth to a long-desired daughter. While for a long time Western research interpreted this myth within a context that reduced women to their reproductive roles, historian Gertrude Nkrumah suggested a different reading: what is significant is “the knowledge that Akua chose to actively engage with the process of making the doll; how the doll is carved out, the shape, the physical features, and the aesthetic nature”. The fact that Akua opted for a female doll is also a sign of her active role “in redefining and negotiating power with the matrilinear, yet patriarchal society, thus creating and inverting power”.₅₎

The power of Akua's doll also resides in Michela Ghisetti's “Che Bambole!”. In their lovingly arranged diversity, they are fascinating and point to the most diverse female lifeworlds.

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