Rachel Kushner

[Charles Albert]

*Who is she? No one seems to know. “A young woman identified only as
Virginia Tusi,” according to the catalogue raisonné. *


http://www.intelius.com/people/Virginia-Tusi/06ryfrre9hg

love,
cfa


On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 7:37 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> fine essay
>
>
> http://www.theparisreview.org/art-photography/6197/the-flamethrowers-rachel-kushner
>
> he young woman in war paint was from an archival document of 1970s Italy,
> and she symbolized for me the insurrectionary foment that overtook the
> country in that decade. “Autonomia” was the term for this foment, the
> movement of the 1970s, a loose wave of people, all over Italy, who came
> together for various reason at various times to engage in illegality and
> play, and to find a way to act, to build forms of togetherness in a country
> whose working class was impotent and whose sub-working class was fed up
> with work, by turns joyous and full of rage, ready to revolt, which they
> did. There were various layers, of which the most violent, shadowy, and
> clandestine (and yet, paradoxically, the most visible and sensational) were
> the Red Brigades. The Italian seventies had seemed a logical subject for
> fiction, on account of the fact that I kept stumbling upon its lore. It all
> began when I met a mys- terious and magnetic Italian woman who didn’t say
> much, and who, when I naively asked her what she did, what she was
> interested in, stared at me and said, “Niente.” She had been the girlfriend
> of a Red Brigades terrorist, I learned. Her “niente” did not mean
> “nothing.” It meant, I don’t engage in what you’d call work. Or interests.
> I might add that I met this woman in a house on Lake Como that was filled
> with someone’s mother’s Fascist memorabilia, busts of Mussolini,
> D’Annunzian slogans chiseled into marble.
>
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