Several workers, artists, graphic designers and architects militated within operaism and workers’ autonomy. The activist, the worker and the monster focuses on the sixties and seventies, more particularly on activist iconography that some artists have developed in magazines such as “classe operaia”, “Potere Operaio” and “Lotta Continua”. How can we interpret these works? This intervention will present numerous examples in order to question the status of the image and the contribution of art history to the understanding of these revolutionary movements.

Jacopo Galimberti is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Manchester, where he is writing a book on the work of artists and architects who participated in operaism and the autonomous movement between 1961 and 1988.

Seminar organized within the framework of the subject “Art et culture visuelle de la Guerre froide à la mondialisation” and the project MoDe(s) – Decentralized Modernity(s): art, politics and counterculture in the transatlantic axis during the Cold War (HAR2017-82755-P), with the support of the UFR ARSH of Grenoble Alpes University.

Image: Pablo Echaurren, drawing published in Lotta Continua, 1977.