Andrea Bowers Revives La Ragnatela's Ecofeminist History in Turin

By Elena Vasquez

Andrea Bowers' solo exhibition "La Ragnatela" opens at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin with four new artworks made for the show. The exhibition reconstructs the history of the Italian anti-nuclear feminist women's camp La Ragnatela — "the spiderweb" in Italian — launched in 1983 in Comiso, Sicily, to protest the installation of US nuclear cruise missiles at the local NATO base.

The timing carries political charge. Last year, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni paused solar panels on farmland, calling it a "threat to our food sovereignty."

The show functions as a mini-retrospective of Bowers' political activist work. It spans works from 2003, made straight out of graduate school, through pieces from 2013, 2022 and 2023, plus the four new creations.

How did Bowers rebuild a forgotten movement?

Much of La Ragnatela's history had been forgotten. Bowers worked with curator Bernardo Follini to find and rebuild the network of Italian ecofeminists. Follini located three women, now in their 80s and 90s, who contributed documents and clippings to the exhibition.

"The social engagement part of my practice is the least known about or documented because the art world is more focused on objects, but this is what I'm most proud of," Bowers said during a preview in Turin.

What opens the show?

The exhibition opens with Defense of Necessity (2003), a quilt nodding to women's traditional crafts, held up as a fence. Close inspection reveals sowings of spiderwebs, a symbol of the Women's Pentagon Action, an American grassroots ecofeminist and anti-nuclear movement that ran parallel to La Ragnatela in Italy and the Greenham Common Women's Peace Encampment in England.

"The fence is the site often where nonviolence is questioned whether it's becoming violence," Bowers explained. "It's a legal term and because it has the word 'fence' in it, it's a play on words and it's poetic."

On the other side of the fence stand four vitrine cases. Two feature a timeline of the La Ragnatela movement. The others display letter exchanges between the women in Comiso and comrades in England, who eventually traveled to Comiso to join the protest. Photographs show some of the women arrested for demonstrating; one, detained and put on trial, wore a T-shirt reading "question authority."

What are the new works?

Bowers took that tagline into Neon Spiderweb #3 (2026), placing the words on the outer string of a neon web. Three other neon works carry slogans: "A better end of the world is possible," "Return our future" and "To be free from fear."

The slogans spill into Political Ribbons (2026), silky colored sheets repeating the mottos or adding new ones: "People over profits," "Outlaw women are the only hope for earth's survival" and "Widen the web to break the nuclear chain." Visitors are urged to take ribbons home. Bowers calls it a "simple way for people to take a position."

Hyperrealistic graphite works from 2003 — Diabloblockade, Diablo Nuclear Power Plant, Abalone Alliance, 198 and Women's Pentagon Action, 1981, Detail of Woven Web Around Pentagon — recreate photographs given to Bowers by her mother's friends in the Californian eco-group Mothers for Peace. In Cardboard (2026), an empowered Italian woman faces away from the audience holding a "Sun and wind" flag; Bowers taught herself iPad drawing to produce the image, projected onto thick cardboard.

The exhibition marks a homecoming: Bowers last showed at the foundation in 1998, in the group show "Guarene 98" — 28 years ago. Her Chandeliers of Interconnectedness pieces now line the halls visitors cross en route to shows by Nan Goldin and Joseph Yaeger. Critics may note the show feels cut short; a second gallery could have demonstrated two decades of environmental commitment. Neon Opland (2026) still lands — a neon doodle from a La Ragnatela poster of a woman kicking a missile, captioned "No ai missile."

The Turin exhibition suggests Bowers has more to say than one gallery can hold, and the recovered Comiso archive gives her the material to say it.