Chiara Fumai (Rome, 1978 – Bari, 2017) wove together visual and performative languages in a continuous dialogue between art, politics, and spirituality. Her practice, deeply influenced by esoteric themes and feminist thought, gave voice to marginal, rebellious, and forgotten figures from alternative culture. Through performances, installations, and videos, Fumai constructed a language that challenges authority and subverts dominant narratives, restoring power and presence to subjects historically silenced.
In a scene from The Book of Evil Spirits (2015), a video work, the artist stages a séance: a medium, blindfolded, rests her hands on a Ouija board to communicate with an otherworldly realm. On the table, a lit candle and a crystal ball help create an atmosphere dense with mysticism. Yet the image goes beyond a mere evocation of the occult—it becomes a metaphor for dialogue with the voices of the past and for reclaiming a collective, suppressed memory. For this work, Chiara Fumai draws inspiration from Eusapia Palladino, the renowned Italian psychic and spiritualist of the nineteenth century, who conducted séances attended by notable figures such as Tsar Nicholas II and the scientist Marie Curie. The narrative of those encounters is here filtered through the figure of the French scientist and astronomer Camille Flammarion, Palladino’s contemporary, who appears above the candle as both witness and commentator to the events. His presence introduces a “rational” and masculine point of view that contrasts with the “irrational” and feminine dimension of the mediumistic ritual, highlighting the tension between scientific knowledge and occult wisdom.
In Fumai’s imagination, the supernatural becomes a space of resistance and subversion. Mediums, witches, heretics, and visionaries of the past embody a form of dissent against the patriarchal and rationalist order of modernity. Often deemed dangerous or deviant, these women were relegated to the margins of society and history. Through her artistic practice, Chiara Fumai brings them back to the center of discourse, interrupting the process of erasure and oblivion to which dominant culture had consigned them. The artist constructs an imaginary archive of figures who dared to oppose mechanisms of power. The spirits summoned in her works become emblems of the prejudices and fears of bourgeois society—a society that rejects everything it cannot control. Thus, Fumai transforms the spiritist dimension into a political act: a gesture of symbolic restitution and redemption, in which the voices of ghosts become voices of rebellion and remembrance.

Chiara Fumai, The Book of Evil Spirits, 2015,
Single channel video
color, sound
Duration: 26min 24sec
video still
Courtesy Archivio Chiara Fumai

15/10/25