Mariuccia Secol’s Feminist Lesson: An Interview with a Pioneering Artist

Art, political struggle, exhibitions, the Venice Biennale, the art system and her view of women artists today are all part of this wide-ranging interview with a pioneering artist and an icon of Italian art. Her work is currently being celebrated in Mariuccia Secol: Unraveling, her first major institutional retrospective, curated by Monika Branicka and Eva Brioschi at Muzeum Susch in Switzerland, on view until 1 November 2026.

This article about Mariuccia Secol was written by Santa Nastro and published in Italian on Artribune, the leading Italian magazine for contemporary art. You can read the original version here.

If you’re new to this wider project, start here: Feminism in Art Isn’t a Style: It’s a Battle Over Visibility.

You can also browse the full archive in my Feminism category.

Read more here about Santa Nastro.

Mariuccia Secol (Castellanza, 1929) is ninety-seven. She has a lively mind and the steady gaze of someone who knows a great deal, has seen a great deal and has done a great deal. She welcomes me into her home and studio in Daverio, a place overflowing with works of art, working materials and pieces by artist friends who have lived in or passed through the house. More than two hundred of her works have been catalogued by the archive managed by her family. Outside, imposing sculptures emerge from the vegetation of her large garden.

Who Is Mariuccia Secol?

With wit and humour, Secol tells the story of a life shaped by art, political struggles, feminism, obstacles and achievements. There are many stories to tell: the war years, the Resistance, a painting and poetry workshop inside a psychiatric hospital, and a life divided between Daverio and Milan, where she moved in the 1990s.

There are also her four children, the conference Donna Arte e Società (Women, Art and Society), her participation in the 1978 Venice Biennale with Varese’s Gruppo Immagine, her lifelong bond with Milli Gandini (Varese, 1941–Castiglione Olona, 2017), and a documentary about her by the artist Sergio Racanati.

Exhibitions Dedicated to Mariuccia Secol

In 2019, Secol’s work and that of Milli Gandini, together with the work of many other women artists who had until then received insufficient recognition from the art system and the market, began to attract renewed attention. This came well before the later surge of research into gender issues, with the exhibition Il soggetto imprevisto. 1978 Arte e Femminismo in Italia (The Unexpected Subject: 1978 Art and Feminism in Italy) at Frigoriferi Milanesi.

In 2023, their work was included in a major exhibition about care work at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop. This was followed by Unraveling, Secol’s large solo exhibition at Muzeum Susch in Switzerland. Curated by Monika Branicka and Eva Brioschi and open until 1 November 2026, the exhibition gives due weight to an important history of art and feminism that, especially today, needs to be told.

The Interview with Mariuccia Secol

You began working as an artist in the 1950s. What kind of training did you have?

At secondary school, I would say. My teacher was Galliano Mazzon, an artist and poet. An exceptional man. I met him again after I was married because, by chance, he was a friend of one of my husband’s cousins. They had both been in the war. Mazzon had lost a hand and the cousin had lost a leg. So they saw each other often, and that was how I found my teacher again. He used to come and visit us with his wife, who always cooked minestrone.

What was her name?

Her name was Giulia Sala. But joking aside, she was a brilliant person. I recently took out some books by Mazzon that I own, and I also found some of the letters we exchanged. She wrote extremely well. I think she was really the communicator in the couple.

At the time, it was unusual for a woman to decide to become an artist. How did your family react?

I married when I was twenty, in 1948, so my parents did not have much to say about it. In fact, to tell the whole story, I was living in my in-laws’ house.

Your husband, Angelo Tognola, was also an artist.

Yes.

What was it like to live as two artists?

Each of us was free to express ourselves through painting. Other artists also came to our house.

For example?

Enrico Baj, but above all Giuliano Vangi and Francesco Fedeli. Fedeli was technically an excellent painter, and he taught us a great deal.

We have several of his works at home. I can say that, after Mazzon, he was a kind of second teacher to me.

I have read that Leonardo Sciascia also came here.

Yes! We even have a photograph together. An Italian teacher at the European School was Sicilian and knew Sciascia. He invited him here to Daverio for a series of lectures, and that was how we met.

Your work was pioneering from the beginning. In the 1960s, you founded and ran a painting and writing workshop inside the psychiatric hospital in Bizzozero, near Varese, drawing inspiration from Jean Dubuffet’s Art Brut. How did the workshops operate? What principles guided them, and what did you take from the experience?

Well, the director of the hospital at the time, Dr Balduzzi, invited me to establish a painting workshop. It all began in 1965 with twelve patients in a room. It continued for more than two years. But then the other patients began to ask, “Why not us?”

What happened?

At the time, I was working in the ward for the most seriously ill patients. In the end, a doctor from another ward, where people could move around on their own, also wanted to involve me. We opened another workshop, and eventually the whole hospital took part. With the nuns’ permission, we had also invited the women.

What was the result?

Nothing doing. Their culture was what we later called “the culture of knitting”. They would say, “But we knit things, and then we sell them or give them to our relatives.” Given that, they did not come to paint.

That must have been disappointing.

It was. But almost immediately, we noticed that the way the patients told their stories was different. There were many illiterate people at the time, and the doctors would often ask them to explain their drawings, looking in them for the reasons behind their illnesses.

We realised that theirs was a poetic way of speaking. So we began encouraging them to write. When someone could not write, we wrote the words down for them, and a kind of poetic writing began to emerge.

Did the women participate at that point?

They heard about it and asked to take part too. We were working in a closed pavilion called the Golgi, which no woman had ever entered, apart from me. I may have been the first.

The women went on strike and marched along the hospital paths, shouting, “We want to go to the Golgi and write poetry!”

It was a real revolution. And they got what they wanted. Afterwards, they began writing poems in the café, when they met together. They wrote everywhere.

We collected their poems, and then Luciano Gallina, a journalist from La Prealpina, decided to select them and publish them in the book Poesia degli esclusi (Poetry of the Excluded), which brought together the words of the patients. It was wonderful. Men and women sat together and wrote. Everyone was writing.

A fully fledged feminist revolution, even then. During those years, your paintings also reflected the trauma of the war you had experienced as a child.

Yes, because, you see, it is all a story of war. It was there from the beginning, and here we are, still living through it today.

Of course.

During the First World War, before my father was married, he was wounded in the abdomen. His unit was retreating, and he was lying abandoned in a field among the wounded. Fortunately, a stretcher-bearer from his hometown happened to pass by, recognised him and saved him. Otherwise, my father would not have survived.

And you would not have been born.

Exactly. Then Fascism came. In the meantime, my brother had been born. He was eight years older than I was and was sent to Russia, where he fought in the Battle of the Don. When he returned to Italy, he joined the Resistance. That was how I met the man who later became my husband.

Was your husband a partisan?

Yes. He was a medical student, but he had to go into hiding because the Germans had come to his house looking for him. They kept returning, so he had to escape to the home of a cousin who was a baker. Sometimes he helped in the shop, and that was how I met him, when I went to buy bread.

She laughs.

And what happened?

Well, my brother realised that something was going on because I was leaving the house after dark. One winter evening, it must have been around five o’clock, he followed me and found us together. He said, “You go home. I’ll speak to him.”

But they were both partisans, so they immediately became friends. The war was getting worse: the bombing of Milan, our escape to the countryside. We went to bed fully dressed.

When the war was over, I married in 1948. A year later, my son Alberto was born.

Alberto Tognola is an artist. Mariuccia Secol has four children. Ed.

Was that when you moved to Daverio?

Yes. My husband was a doctor. He secured a position as the local municipal physician and was transferred here. I already had three children by then. Sometimes I would stir the risotto while I painted.

Eventually, we moved into the house where we live now. We created a space upstairs with our artists’ studios and a play area for the children. I worked while keeping an eye on them.

In the 1970s, you began working with Milli Gandini and Mirella Tognola, with whom you founded Varese’s Gruppo Immagine.

The young people who had taken part in the student protests invited me to join a consciousness-raising group in Varese. I went, and it turned my life upside down!

Why?

We were all living lives that made us unhappy. My mother used to say, “You are right to fight. We were unhappy without knowing why.”

We began to understand who we were and what we had to do. It all began there.

Could you explain that more fully?

We were unhappy because we had no personal autonomy. But now we knew why. That was where our struggle began.

Your idea of feminism was somewhat different, however, because you were all married and you were mothers.

We worked together, with our children alongside us. My husband was a good doctor, loved and respected. Everyone was very fond of him. But his culture was a male culture.

He was never aggressive towards me, but I could not do anything without permission. As I became more conscious, I also became more independent. My husband was politically active himself, so at a certain point he had to stop trying to prevent me from going out or doing certain things.

He did those things, so why couldn’t I?

We practised consciousness-raising for an entire year. We understood more and more because each of us talked about her own unhappiness. And from those sessions, the path we needed to take began to emerge.

How did art help you through all this?

That was how I expressed myself.

In 1974, you organised the conference Donna Arte e Società (Women, Art and Society) in Milan, which led to the document Vogliamo Vo(g)liamo (We Want, We Fly). What emerged from the manifesto, and how was it received by the public?

We organised the conference and presented a contribution in which we set out our reasons and our objectives. The autonomy we were talking about.

But feminist groups were often in conflict with one another. The group from Rome, for example, accused us of fighting for money, which was not true, of course. Our ways of taking action were also different. Their meetings were completely theoretical.

There was not much practical work. They were not artists, although the group included many excellent journalists. They called us “the mountain girls” because we all came from Varese, and “the rough ones” because we were artists.

There was always some friction. We could never bring the two groups together. Everyone wanted her own ideas to come first.

What did you think of Carla Lonzi?

Carla was fantastic.

You were closer to the group in Padua.

Exactly. To the ideas associated with the Salario al lavoro domestico (Wages for Housework) movement. The message from Padua was that when you are economically independent, you have the power to put your ideas into practice.

For example, would you like to know why we formed the group? At the beginning, it was just Milli Gandini and me. Then there was an incident, a rape case in the Veneto region.

The women demonstrating were not allowed into the courtroom, but women from across north-eastern Italy gathered outside the courthouse. It was extraordinary, and the man was convicted.

It was one of the first times this had happened. Before then, rape was not even considered a real crime. It was treated more like a youthful prank.

We understood that, if you want to fight and achieve results, you need strength. You cannot remain an isolated individual. That was how Varese’s Gruppo Immagine began.

How was the manifesto Vogliamo Vo(g)liamo (We Want, We Fly) received?

Well, everything remained more or less confined to the private sphere. That was also why the Rome group did not accept us.

They said we supported male domination because, at the conference, we had used a desk and a microphone, which they considered symbols of patriarchy. But seven hundred people came. We had to make ourselves heard somehow.

What were your objectives?

After Donna Arte e Società (Women, Art and Society), we decided that we would stop working with galleries that asked us to pay fifty lire a day to exhibit. We wanted to be recognised as professional artists.

Participating in the 1978 Venice Biennale

In 1978, you participated in the Venice Biennale with Dalla creatività femminile come maternità-natura al controllo-ricerca della natura (From Female Creativity as Motherhood-Nature to the Control and Investigation of Nature). Did you expect this recognition?

We wrote a wonderful project and sent it to Carlo Ripa di Meana, who was president of the Biennale at the time. He accepted it. And that was how our journey to Venice began.

The boats came to collect all our works. That year’s theme, Dalla natura all’arte (From Nature to Art), worked in our favour.

There were Milli Gandini, Mirella Tognola, Clemen Parrocchetti, Silvia Cibaldi, Maria Grazia Sironi and me. We had an enormous room in the Magazzini del Sale, so we decided to involve another feminist group.

We invited the group from Naples, which included Rosa Panaro, Valeria Dioguardi, Anna Trapani and Bruna Sarno.

The entrance, in keeping with the Biennale’s theme, was a triumph of nature. It was surrounded by two-metre-high panels that protected the interior. There was a plastic pool filled with water, which represented amniotic fluid.

Our dome-shaped works, each measuring two by two metres, were reflected in the water. Each of us signed her own work. We kept our individual identities while working as a group.

What kind of response did you receive?

An enormous number of people came. For example, the former director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Prague, who also taught at the European School, invited us to exhibit in what was then Czechoslovakia.

We went to Paris, Portugal and Sardinia. But most of our invitations came through initiatives of this kind. Far fewer came from galleries.

Did Italian galleries pay attention to your work?

Galleries did not take feminism into consideration.

Of course, we also exhibited in Italy, at Spazio Metropolitano in Milan, for example. But that came later, in the first half of the 1980s.

So, despite the Biennale, nobody rolled out the red carpet for us.

What do you remember about the other artists in the group?

The most important relationship was with Milli Gandini. Milli worked in the mornings in her husband’s design studio, and she was a designer herself. I worked at the psychiatric hospital.

When we finished work, we met. Every morning was one long discussion! There was clearly a deep understanding between us. My relationship with her was always the strongest.

Other artists later joined the group and then left for personal reasons that, naturally, are not for me to discuss. But I had a strong rapport with many of them.

In 1980, Galleria Cavedra in Varese hosted the historic exhibition La mamma è uscita (Mother Has Gone Out), which addressed gender roles and issues critically and ironically. What do you remember about that exhibition?

La mamma è uscita (Mother Has Gone Out) meant that the mother had stepped outside her roles.

We made a large poster for the city showing where the exhibition was taking place. It was a very important moment. We later used the same title for our book, now published by DeriveApprodi, because it was the most meaningful title we could have chosen.

At first, we were not sure whether to write the book. Then a very young woman said to us, “Thank you for your struggle. It changed our lives.”

That was when we thought that perhaps we needed to make the struggle public and tell the story of the events, the experiences and the obstacles we had faced.

What did motherhood represent for you?

It was an issue that affected almost all women, especially when it came to control over our own bodies and abortion.

Very few people could obtain the contraceptive pill. It was probably still at an experimental stage, and it was difficult to take.

During those years, I exhibited a work in Rome. It was a silhouette representing a mother, with a small dress placed over it. I wanted to explain that, even when a woman has an abortion, the mother feels pain in her heart. It is always painful.

At the time, there was neither a right to abortion nor a right to contraception. These were things that had to be denounced and could not be underestimated.

Is the art world ready to accept artists who are mothers, women artists and women who are both mothers and artists?

It is not ready to accept women in general. It is a male-dominated environment. There’s no getting around it.

I do not know exactly what the situation within feminism is today, but I remember very well that, during the 1980s and 1990s, there were still women intellectuals and journalists who, when invited to speak, made a point of saying that they were not feminists. It was almost as though they were ashamed.

It was an absurd contradiction after everything feminism had been through.

Women themselves must change first because their culture is still dominated by patriarchy. After all, that is what they are taught, isn’t it? That is why feminism is still necessary.

When we presented La mamma è uscita (Mother Has Gone Out) at the Casa delle Donne in Milan, Corrado Levi came over to me. He told me that he had established a male consciousness-raising group. What he meant was that men, too, have work to do if they want to free themselves from patriarchy.

In your opinion, has gender equality been achieved in the art world?

The expression “gender equality” does not solve the problem for me.

What do you mean?

Culture distinguishes between men and women. So it may look like equality, but deep down it is not. There is a difference because men do not give birth.

Returning to art, you and many other women artists, including Clemen Parrocchetti and Milli Gandini, used objects, fabrics, textiles and things taken from the domestic world. Was that a choice or a necessity?

A choice! It was our material.

Many mid-career artists are currently drawing inspiration from your work. I am thinking, for example, of Glorious Mothers.

It was a great joy to meet Vera Maglioni and Francesca Grossi, who work together as Grossi Maglioni.

They also involved me and Manuela Gandini, Milli’s daughter, who is a journalist and curator and has worked hard to promote her mother’s work, in an interview.

But I want to make it clear that these artists really are independent thinkers, even though they are working along the same lines. They are very good artists.

Which recent exhibitions have been the most important for you?

In 2019, Il soggetto imprevisto. 1978 Arte e Femminismo in Italia (The Unexpected Subject: 1978 Art and Feminism in Italy), curated by Marco Scotini and Raffaella Perna, was held at Frigoriferi Milanesi in Milan.

Scotini is a very important curator for me. That exhibition led to my being invited, in 2023, to an important international exhibition that also included Milli’s work.

It was titled Cooking Cleaning Caring: Care Work in the Arts since 1960 and examined the relationship between art and care work. It was held at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop in Germany.

And now there is this major exhibition dedicated to you at Muzeum Susch in Switzerland. Did you expect your work to receive this recognition?

No, I never thought about it.

And when people ask me whether I am happy, I make a point of saying that I am not happy for myself. I am happy because the feminist idea is being affirmed again, in years as difficult as these.

Are you still working?

I have very little energy. But I still work on small things.

In 2008, at the Camille Saint-Saëns Musical Academy in Crosio della Valle, near Varese, I exhibited seventy-seven notebooks. I had actually made many more, but I had not finished them.

Now I am completing these small things.

What does the object you are holding represent?

The depleted-uranium bombs dropped on Iraq. Bombs that consume the flesh, the bones and the body but leave the clothes intact.

You have returned to where you began, to war.

In this exhibition, titled Mark ’77, I also involved children. They made small books too. A vocalist performed the women’s lament, and the floor was covered with a thick layer of clothes, representing the clothing found in graves.

I could never have staged an exhibition like that in Milan.

This is what my work is today. I call this way of working “the leftovers”. They are the things that were left over, the things I have not yet done.

Santa Nastro

Mariuccia Secol: Unraveling Muzeum Susch
curated by Monika Branicka and Eva Brioschi 
Sur Punt 78 Susch
Until 1 November 2026