

Photo © Giorgio Benni

TOMASO BINGA
AlphaSymbol, 2021
Tomaso Binga (b. 1931), the pseudonym of Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, was conceived as an ironic and provocative alter ego to denounce the exclusion of women from the art world in the 1970s. Active since the 1960s, her work brings together writing and gesture, word and body, in a critical and anti-rhetorical reflection on dominant language. The adoption of a male name in 1977, at Galleria Campo D in Rome, marked a symbolic act of resistance against the patriarchal mechanisms of the art system. Her practice opposes cultural standardization, using irony as a tool of subversion. In the work AlphaSymbol, letters and graphic signs form opto-visual panels that echo Kinetic and Optical Art, while simultaneously disrupting the logic of writing, transforming the word into image, body, and gesture. Her visual alphabet becomes a political act that challenges linguistic, aesthetic, and social conventions, reclaiming space for the word and the female body as forms of Freedom and self-determination.