Shut Up Actually Talk – Chiara Fumai at Nottingham Contemporary

Shut Up, Actually Talk: aggressive, progressive, brilliant.

When leaving the Carol Rama gallery space in Nottingham Contemporary after Shut Up, Actually Talk, I feel a little intimidated and more than a little bewildered, to the extent that I can’t even gauge others’ reactions to the piece. However, upon reflection, once the initial shock of a first encounter with performance art has had time to mellow, Chiara Fumai’s brief ‘radical feminist freak show’ remains challenging and provocative but is ultimately very effective.

Fumai has fashioned herself as faux-Circassian beauty Zalumma Agra, an attraction in P. T. Barnum’s nineteenth-century circus. Presented as a ‘star of the East’, as a pure woman saved from the impurity of slavery, this figure is forced into a role that works through a number of racial, sexual and gender stereotypes. This is especially poignant because Zalumma Agra was not permitted to speak when performing; her value as a freak show attraction required her silence. She was something to look at, something for others to surround with mythical discourses rather than a person with a voice of her own. Fumai addresses this problem of necessary silence, and offers the woman behind Zalumma Agra a language that shatters her illusory persona and turns the tables on the dumbfounded audience.

This language is the words of Italian radical feminist Carla Lonzi and her 1970s manifesto Rivolta Femminile. Fumai is verbally aggressive, spitting out the original Italian with the same vehemence as she uses when she spits on the gallery floor, at first seemingly reacting to an inadequate audience response. Her eye contact is persistent and intense, and her slight figure combined with the big hair falsely attributed to the Circassian race is imposing. There are long pauses, and meditations laced with malice on ‘who says…’ followed by a quotation or belief, each quickly revealed to be antithetical or at least not quite fitting to radical feminist thinking, instead feeding into the patriarchal frame of reference that allows figures like Zalumma Agra to function.

Fumai uses relations of speech and silence very successfully; the fact that Barnum’s Zalumma Agra is ‘shut up’ allows her to ‘actually talk’ on a symbolic level. Zalumma is an explicit example of routine oppression and interpellation, a template which applies not only to gender, as in this context, but could also apply to other intersectional forms of oppression involving race, religion and sexuality, for example. Fumai certainly actually talks during this performance, rendering her audience speechless, momentarily weakened and exposed by her verbal strength. In this sense, those who in the past have talked, those who have provided the narratives, are forced into silence. Fumai as Zalumma announces that she has finally found her ‘sort of humans’ and, once this has been achieved, it is ‘time to go’. She has actually spoken in a way that has shut us up, before stalking out of the room, while everyone shifts a little uncomfortably in their seats. I have stared at her as though she is an attraction at a freak show, and yet, by the end of the performance, I feel as if it is me who is being stared at.

Shut Up, Actually Talk is bold and intelligent, despite being initially unnerving. Its simultaneous subtlety and vulgarity interacts with the backdrop of Carol Rama’s works made up of bicycle tyre tubes: both artists contrast the spoken with the unspoken, the explicit with the implicit. For both, these relations seem to have a political, in this case feminist, edge. Fumai and Rama challenge the conventions surrounding whose thoughts, language and expressions carry authority, repeatedly asking: who gets to call who a freak?