The sprawling exhibition Euforia at Naples’ Madre Museum feels like a joyous exhale. Spanning over 120 works and occupying the institution’s entire third floor, it is the most comprehensive survey to date of Tomaso Binga—the pseudonym of Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, a pioneering figure in Italian visual art and poetry. Curated by Madre’s director Eva Fabbris and London’s Mimosa House curator Daria Khan, Euforia is more than a retrospective; it is a reclamation of space and voice for a trailblazing artist who has long operated at the fringes of mainstream recognition. Born in Salerno in 1931, Binga adopted her masculine pseudonym in the 1970s as a satirical critique of the male-dominated art world. This act of gendered subversion is emblematic of her broader practice, which consistently interrogates and destabilises societal norms through a fusion of language, performance and the body.

Euforia eschews a chronological order and is instead organised into thematic sections that trace the evolution of Binga’s practice over four decades. From early typewritten visual poems to later installations and collages, the retrospective showcases her relentless experimentation with form and medium. Notably, the exhibition design by the multidisciplinary collective Rio Grande employs a striking layout. At the heart of this spatial choreography are red and pink snaking tubes that wind through the galleries in a manner reminiscent of the steel pipes that run above ground to divert groundwater during street construction. Selected works are hung on the tubes or are displayed on gently curved metal surfaces suspended from them, allowing viewers to move around and within the structures as if inhabiting the syntax of Binga’s visual language. This immersive, serpentine form emphasises fluidity, not only of movement but of meaning, encouraging a sensory and spatial relationship to the artworks. The walls are punctuated with archival materials, handwritten poems and projected performances. (When the 94-year-old artist saw the final results of the designers’ spatial interventions—spaces that seem to breathe with her visual rhythms and semantic provocations—she reportedly exclaimed that her work has never been so fully understood.)

One of the exhibition’s focal points is Binga’s seminal photographic series Scrittura Vivente (Living Writing) from 1976, in which she contorted her nude body into the shapes of alphabet letters. In each black-and-white photograph, her limbs twist into angular consonants, her spine arches to form soft vowels and her body—alternately tense and fluid—becomes a living calligraphic tool. Posed against minimal backdrops, the focus remains entirely on the raw physicality of form and gesture. (The exhibition’s title was chosen because the Italian word for ‘euphoria’ is spelt with all the vowels used in the Italian language.) These photographs are not mere visual puns; they are radical assertions of bodily autonomy and linguistic agency. By embodying language—quite literally spelling herself into existence—Binga collapses the divide between signifier and signified, challenging the viewer to reconsider the intersections of identity, communication and power. It is also, just like much of her output, magnificently and darkly humorous.

This distinctive humour resides in the series Grafici di storie d’amore (Charts of Love Stories), from the 1970s, where she transformed analytic data visualisation into a biting parody of romantic and emotional life. Mimicking the aesthetics of bar graphs, Binga charts the uncharted: caresses, jealousy, seduction, betrayal. These faux-analytical visuals reduce the complexity of relationships into absurd metrics. Presented with deadpan clarity—clean lines, typewritten or handwritten text and minimal design—one graph in particular charts a relationship in decline. Indeed, the numbers are abysmal. It is likely a metricised representation of a year in which the artist’s husband, art critic Filiberto Menna, had been unfaithful.

In an adjacent gallery and on view for the first time are the dozens of letters Binga typed as part of Ti scrivo solo di domenica (I Only Write to You on Sundays), a year-long performance from 1977 in which she wrote weekly letters to herself. It was a conceptual and poetic gesture rooted in both ritual and resistance. She chose Sundays deliberately: a day traditionally associated with rest, family and domestic obligation—especially for women in Catholic, patriarchal Italian society. By reclaiming this day to write to herself, Binga was carving out a space of autonomy and introspection. This notion of carving out space resonates throughout the exhibition, especially as a physical leitmotif in her body of work from the early to mid-70s using discarded Styrofoam packaging. Originally moulded to protect consumer goods, these forms—rigid, white and ghostly—are repurposed into abstract structures that evoke minimalist sculpture. In the negative spaces carved out to protect products, Binga inserts fragments of newspapers, magazine clippings, typewritten text and her signature glyphs and alphabets to create layered, sculptural collages, transforming industrial waste into poetic, politicised objects.

Binga’s inclusion in The Milk of Dreams at the 2022 Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani, marked a renewed institutional recognition of her work. The exhibition, which focused on female and non-binary artists exploring themes of transformation, language and the body, included Binga’s early visual and performative works that examine the relationship between text and identity. Alemani’s curatorial framework directly referenced Materializzazione del linguaggio, a groundbreaking exhibition of women artists organised by Mirella Bentivoglio for the 1978 Venice Biennale, where Binga’s work was also featured. That 1978 show was the first explicitly feminist exhibition in the Biennale’s history, emphasising experimental uses of language by women artists. By including Binga in The Milk of Dreams, Alemani highlighted both the historical significance and continued relevance of her practice, situating her early contributions within a broader, transhistorical conversation on feminist strategies in art. It also marked Binga’s return to the Biennale after more than four decades.

Meanwhile, Euforia features several recordings of Binga’s poetry performances and even an RAI television appearance, which broadcast her avant-garde practice into Italians’ living rooms. Often beginning with simple recitations, Binga manipulates tone, rhythm and breath to strip language of its normative function. A core part of her work, these performances, primarily from the 1970s and 1980s, merge spoken word, gesture, sound and satire, transmuting language into a live, embodied event. Many of these performances critique the rigidity of patriarchal language systems by exposing their arbitrary, performative nature. Through mispronunciation, nonsense and repetition, Binga unmoors language from its everyday role, revealing it as a site of potential subversion. Her intent is clear and as relevant as ever: to reclaim voice, authorship and the tools of expression from male-dominated cultural frameworks.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.

'Euforia' is on view at Madre Museum Naples until September 15, 2025.