Triangolo rovesciato (Le Barriere) / Inverted triangle (The Barriers), 1978

Mixed media; 195 × 200 × 14 cm

Le Barriere (1978) was originally conceived as part of a collective work by the Immagine Feminist Group of Varese, comprising Cibaldi, Gandini, Parrocchetti, Secol, and Sironi. Parrocchetti joined the group in 1978, the year in which the collective participated in the Venice Biennale.

Conceived as a collective installation, Le Barriere uses a series of inverted-triangle structures as display frames for the artists’ works, transforming the conventional function of the frame into a device for articulating and containing their explicitly political content.

In Parrocchetti’s installation, the structure is used to hold objects and motifs drawn from her established visual vocabulary, including mouths and vaginal forms, as sites of female power and liberation. She also implements objects associated with sewing and domestic labour, like spools that are used by the artist to symbolise masculine power and plastic tatting shuttles to represent femininity. Within the rigid-like geometry of the inverted triangle, these elements create a visual language of both containment and resistance, which the artist also describes in an accompanying text written for the Mezzo Cielo exhibition catalog at the Galleria d’arte Porta Ticinese, Milan, 1978.