Adelaide Gigli: Artist, Activist, Exile – A Biography by Adriàn N. Bravi

Adriàn N. Bravi's book 'Adelaida' (Nutrimenti, 144 pp., €17) recounts the life of Adelaide Gigli (1927–2010), an Italian-Argentine artist, ceramist, writer, and activist. Born in Recanati in 1927 to painter Lorenzo Gigli and artist Maria Teresa Valeiras, she moved to Buenos Aires at age four as her family fled fascist Italy. Later, in Argentina, she faced the brutal dictatorship of General Jorge Rafael Videla. Her children, María Adelaide 'Mini' and Lorenzo Ismael Viñas Gigli, were Montonero guerrillas who were arrested, tortured, and disappeared. Gigli co-founded the literary magazine Contorno with her husband David Viñas, was the only woman on its editorial board, and militated in the Homosexual Liberation Front. Her artistic practice shifted from painting to ceramics after encountering Timotocuica indigenous potters in Mérida, Venezuela, in the 1960s. She described her work as 'a voice that denounces with sarcasm and desacralization.' Many of her works and those of her father are lost due to exile and political turmoil. Bravi, a friend and fellow Italian-Argentine, also worked to preserve her archive of books, documents, and records. In 2003, the Mole Vanvitelliana in Ancona held a major retrospective of her work. Gigli died in 2010 after battling Alzheimer's. Bravi's book aims to prevent her from remaining 'a stranger everywhere.'