Elementos de beleza: um jogo de chá nunca é apenas um jogo de chá engages with the history of and strategy adopted by the British suffragettes of the late 19th century, to prompt discussions on issues of representation, including the representation of the female body and the democratic voting system. As seen in the case of The Toilet of Venus (1647) by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), canonical paintings of female nudes were notorious targets, not only because the attacks offered the suffragettes the opportunity to disseminate their cause through the press, but also as they used to create a cultural confrontation with idealized models of beauty and femininity. In her work, Zaccagnini is interested in narratives that structure systems of power. She utilizes historical documents and archives, highlighting how these narratives are formed, propagated, and fixed in our imaginaries. The empty rectangles with black outlines that constitute this work refer to expert drawings and follow the dimensions of each one of the damaged pieces. The work is accompanied by an audio guide presenting conjectures about the motivations and the choices behind which works were attacked. Originally conceived to fill neutral walls, with the tracings arranged as in an exhibition installation, the work was reconfigured to the glass easels in 2019, in the context of the Feminist Histories exhibition. Dislocated from the Picture Gallery in Transformation chronological order, Elementos de beleza is among the 19th-century male artists paintings. Its presence causes a strangeness referring to the suffragettes’s provocations made in the same period.
— Isabella Rjeille, curator, MASP, and Talita Trizoli, Ph.D. in Education, USP, 2019
By Isabella Rjeille
In Elementos de beleza: um jogo de chá nunca é apenas um jogo de chá [Elements of Beauty: a Tea Set is Never Only a Tea Set] and Elementos de beleza: por ordem de aparição [Elements of Beauty: In Order of Appearance], Carla Zaccagnini engages with the history of and strategy adopted by the suffragettes of the late 19th century, when they attacked works of art in order to prompt discussions on issues of representation, including the representation of the female body and the democratic voting system. Among the attacked artworks, canonical paintings of female nudes were notorious targets, including The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus) (1647) by Diego Velásquez (1599–1660). The attacks against important works of art offered the suffragettes the opportunity to disseminate their cause through the press, while creating a cultural confrontation with idealized models of beauty and femininity. In her work, Zaccagnini is interested in narratives that structure systems of power. She utilizes documents and archives, highlighting how these narratives are formed, propagated, and fixed in our imaginaries. In Elements of Beauty: a Tea Set is Never Only a Tea Set, the empty rectangles with black outlines refer to expert drawings. The work is accompanied by an audio guide presenting conjectures about the choices behind which works were attacked. In Elements of Beauty: In Order of Appearance, a development of the previous work, the artist gathered newspapers with news about the attacks and highlighted words and phrases that were used to refer to each character involved in the events. The choices of words that describe the characters offer clues as to how these attacks reverberated in the imaginary of the time. These words and phrases are exposed “in order of appearance,” creating a kind of unfinished script, or indexes of ambiguous social relations of criminalization and marginalization of women who escaped the standards of femininity at that time.
— Isabella Rjeille, curator, MASP, and Talita Trizoli, Ph.D. in Education, USP, 2019
