Magic Carpet & Bomb A
Angela Marzullo

Women’s demonstrations in Washington, London and Geneva provide an essential historical backdrop to this reading. From the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington to the great suffragette marches in London in the early 20th century, to the later mobilisations in Switzerland, where women’s suffrage was not achieved until 1971, these movements shaped a political imagination based on visibility, solidarity and the power of the collective. Marching, occupying the streets, making the body visible in public spaces: these are all founding gestures that have become models of resistance. In the contemporary American context, this memory resonates with disturbing relevance: the questioning of women’s rights, the regression of abortion rights and political attempts to neutralise or erase the word “woman” in favour of supposedly neutral but deeply ideological terminology are part of a broader movement to symbolically render women invisible in public and legal spaces. This tension between historical achievements and current vulnerability highlights the continuing fragility of acquired rights.

In this context, Angela Marzullo’s works, whether Magic Carpet interventions or the Bomb A project, engage with these legacies without freezing them in place. They shift symbols, replay codes, and transform archives into living gestures. Far from being reduced to a passive figure, the female body becomes a political subject, capable of diverting, disrupting and reformulating dominant narratives.

The carpet, a domestic and decorative object, becomes a performative space of resistance, where the female body reappropriates symbols and territories. These interventions play on a subtle shift between homage, irony and critical rewriting, revealing the porosity between militant heritage and contemporary issues. The fragility of the bodies on display, the precariousness of rights, but also the power of shared gestures are at the heart of this work, where memory and presence intertwine to create a critical, poetic and deeply political space.

In Bomb A, the artist radicalises this tension between vulnerability and power. The body becomes both a surface for projection, a tool for protest and a place of exposed fragility. Angela Marzullo uses humour, provocation and derision to destabilisestandardised representations of femininity, while revealing the violence of the structures that shape our perceptions. Far from adopting a victim stance, she affirms a dynamic of empowerment in which laughter becomes a political strategy and the grotesque a weapon.

Present in Biel, these works offer a feminist interpretation of vulnerability as a force for action, as the ability to transform the exposure of the body into an act of care, resistance and solidarity. The exhibition brings together images, performance documents and visual traces, highlighting the performative and contextual dimensions of these works, while inviting the public to actively reflect on the relationships between visibility, power and emancipation.

Angela Marzullo’s work thus opens up a space where the memory of struggles, criticism of norms and the reinvention of political gestures come together, reinforcing the committed, reflective and sensitive dimension of this edition of the Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography.

Year of production:

Magic Capet: 2017-
Bomb A: 2017

With the support of: République et Canton de Genève