At a distance of forty years from Identitè italienne, the important exhibition curated by Germano Celant in Centre Pompidou, Villa Arson has now become the temporary theatre – for the French and international art audience – of the most recent Italian artistic scene: from the generation that emerged in the 1990s to that of today. The characteristic common to the twenty artists (or artistic groups) in the exhibition is not the confirmation of a cultural belonging, nor is it the effect of the – more or less slow – sedimentation of a time that has developed through continuity. It is rather a temporal fracture, a missed encounter with history, a sort of social and cultural trauma.

This kind of artistic scene is defined by the disorientation caused by the official cancellation of the revolutionary and creative wave of the 1970s and the need to permit the emergence (if not the recovery) of that which had been removed by the ideological and neo-liberal reactions which began in the 1980s. The exhibition, beginning with its very title The Future Behind Us, explicitly refers to a little explored image of the contemporary Italian artistic scene: that marked by an anachronism, by a basic gap that sees a great anticipatory emancipation such as that expressed by the social forces of the 1970s. As a consequence, the view that this exhibition displays is two-fold and upside down. The temporal fracture becomes the space of an appointment and an encounter with the past – a past that none of the participating artists has lived in person but to which they intend to be witnesses. Bringing together under a common denominator that which three generations of artists have produced is anything but easy in the light of the Cultural dispersion that this scene has suffered over the past few years.

The archive conceived as a paradigm and the meticulous operation on history and counter-narratives is a distinctive mark of Rossella Biscotti’s practice. The Trial (2010–2013) focuses on the events that took place from April 7, 1979 onwards, in which a number of Italian militants and intellectuals, former members of Potere Operaio and Autonomia Operaia, were arrested throughout Italy on charges of terrorism. They were accused of being the leaders of the armed organization of the Brigate Rosse, and for the kidnapping and execution of Aldo Moro on the eve of a “historic compromise” between the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party. The evidence supporting the prosecution was and remains unfounded, yet most of the accused were held in preventive detention from 1979 until the trial closed in 1984. The trial was situated within the period of social and political unrest experienced by Italy since its increased economic productivity after World War II. Prior to its dissolution in 1973, the Potere Operaio movement was influential in pushing toward an alliance between the libertarian student protests of 1968 and the autonomous labor movement of 1969. This formed the backdrop against which Autonomia Operaia would emerge in the mid-1970s as a rhizomatic network of intellectuals throughout Italy. The thinkers of the Italian autonomist movement were the first to recognize a massive integration of the relationships between labor, exploitation, and creativity.

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