Mariuccia Secol: Unraveling

A cinematic glimpse into the installation of the exhibition at Muzeum Susch

The teaser follows the hands that bring the exhibition into being, piece by piece—blurred movements through the space, long exposures, an object carefully set in place. The curators lift works, examine and position them, then step back. Close-ups reveal the textures of fabric, thread and metal as light moves across the materials, transforming them once again.

Not a summary, but an impression. Not a portrait, but an approach to a practice itself rooted in unravelling and reassembling.

This film takes viewers through Unraveling, the first comprehensive institutional retrospective devoted to Italian artist and activist Mariuccia Secol at Muzeum Susch. Curated by Monika Branicka and Eva Brioschi, the exhibition spans more than seventy years of a practice that brings radical feminism, social critique and historical reckoning into dialogue.

The film begins with a refusal: of silence, of prescribed roles, and of the idea that art can be separated from life. Secol's early paintings from the 1950s and 1960s carry the weight of a century marked by war—images that do not illustrate violence but inscribe it into the surface, into the material itself. Her work in the painting studio of a psychiatric clinic in Varese, together with the social upheavals of the late 1960s, fundamentally changed her understanding of art: care shifted from the private to the political.

Secol turned away from canvas and towards everyday materials—aprons, steel wool and household textiles—which she later described as “instruments of the female role.” In works such as The Doll's House, she dismantled her own clothing, including her wedding dress, to create headless and faceless figures: not portraits, but visible structures of expectation and role. In 1974, together with her daughter Mirella and other artists, she founded the feminist group Immagine, which joined the international “Wages for Housework” campaign and participated in the 1978 Venice Biennale. This period also gave rise to Secol's characteristic technique: pulling threads from fabric to open fissures she called “stretch marks”—traces of the body and of injury through which light, and another kind of knowledge, can enter.

In her later work, her view expands beyond personal experience: migration, ecological collapse and forms of structural violence join her early feminist concerns—not as separate struggles, but as interconnected expressions of the same structures. In quiet, material-focused images, the film follows this visual language as it developed over more than seven decades, allowing Secol's persistent desire to imagine “another way of living” to resonate in the present.