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Bubble Gum is an all-female choir founded by Pippa Bacca, a performance artist and environmental activist, tragically famous for her violent death on March 31, 2008, during her performance of Bride on Tour (Le spose in viaggio) in Turkey. She was 33.
The goal of her last performance was to pass through multiple stops on a journey to Jerusalem. Kicking her tour off in Trieste, Italy, she took time along the way to meet with midwives, held to be the feminine symbols of life and maternity. The encounters between the artists (Bacca and one other companion artist travelling with her) and the different midwives saw the repeated performance of two symbolic moments: the midwives lined Bacca’s wedding dress and Bacca, in return, washed their feet.
The performance of Bride on Tour had been carefully prepared over the course of a year. The overall message was one of cross-border peace and the artistic objective was to create a symbol of that with a presentation of photographs taken during the journey and a presentation comparing the dress Bacca had lined by the different midwives against the original design of the dress stored in the workshops of the Italian clothing brand Byblos.
Bacca was buried with the dress she wore on her tour as it was the dress she wore at the time of her death.
Her violent death contributed to divesting Bacca of her personality to transform her into a public icon. We offer a different vision of her oeuvre, discussing Bubble Gum as a fundamentally artistic undertaking and bringing back into view what it created. The choir, its songs, and exuberant performances extend the possibility of a permanent work of art that could allow successors to breathe new life into the panoply of characters (living and disembodied) and revitalize or even “resurrect” the now absent artist.
Bubble Gum in historical and political context
Bacca developed her talent with the Coro di Micene, an historically anarchist choir in Milan. The idea behind Bubble Gum would be as simple as it was subversive: for what reason should left-wing women have to present themselves as “ugly” to be taken seriously? Bubble Gum was born to overthrow this norm, to create opportunities for activist and cultivated women to play with aesthetics and different types of femininity.
The possibility of a demystified feminine eroticism presentable to the public was only raised in the world of contemporary European art in the 1950s, with the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle. Saint Phalle based her art on the idea that it was possible to be a woman, a successful artist, a feminist, and a vamp at the same time and without diminishing oneself. The same philosophy drove Bubble Gum in their use of ironic and erotic imagery as a counterweight to the Italian political context of the time. Just as Saint Phalle did in 1950s France, Bubble Gum roused a countercultural resistance to local notions of femininity. The art historian Catherine Dossin has said of Simone de Beauvoir and Saint Phalle that “Their femininity actually gave them more serious credibility: in the French context, the masquerade of hyper-femininity was a political position—an effective counter-hegemonic and counter-patriarchal stance” (2010, 34).
The choir was born in the summer of 2005, after the arrival to power of what was called the putocrazia (a portmanteau of “plutocracy” and “whore”) of the then prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.
Particular ideas of femininity were taken hostage by left- and right-wing political forces who precipitated a polarization between two feminine clichés: on one hand the “whores” (those on Berlusconi’s side, the scantily clad young women or “velines” of “bunga-bunga” parties) and on the other hand, the moralizing shrews. All freedom to express femininity (including female sexuality) was reduced to those two opposing poles. Bubble Gum took on the image of the 1950s pinup, the music hall entertainer, the burlesque performer and the female diva. The choir would open up the possibility for, and go on to champion, a femininity reinvested with the excessive and the grotesque, and go on to remind women of their power to make demands and ensure they are met, with each own unique style.
Twenty-five minutes of madness on stage!
Bubble Gum is a performance, at once offbeat, ironic, and dreamlike. Each performer comes on stage in character, a being that exists only during the performance, disappearing with its end.
Bacca’s real name was Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo. As her Bubble Gum alter ego, she was Eva Adamovich, joined by a bawdy cast of characters: Betty Bu, Citofonare Giusy, Demi More, Gilda, Ginger, Greta Ginzburg, Lulù Tutù, Madame De Wicca, Minnie, Misù Bijù, Rosemary Grosswein, SantaRita Dal New Jersey, SportyBubble, Tatì, and Wendy. They rarely all sing at once, but rather act as an adaptable ensemble that adjusts itself to the number of participants for each performance.
There were no criteria for joining the choir: all women who wanted to sing and have fun were welcome. Nevertheless, Bubble Gum retains the classic choir structure of three feminine voice types: soprano, mezzo-soprano, and contralto. They sing a capella. Nobody actually knows musical theory. The rehearsal directors are volunteers who arrange well-known songs and jazz standards for the choir. The musical repertoire is composed of three “canoni” that open each concert: “Dam Di Dam,” “Swing your Arms,” and “Doobie Doobie.” The program continues with “Summertime,” “Over the Rainbow,” “Love Me Tender,” “Besame Mucho,” and, following Bacca’s death, “Moon River” (under the guise of it being her birthday song).
The choir takes its mark without announcement. The performers wearing dresses and heels, excessive makeup, false eyelashes, glitter, and colorful garb. Adamovich standing out with her black parakeet and fake ostrich feather boa (since her death all the costumes include a boa). They organize themselves in a semi-circle facing the audience. One of the members (originally Adamovich) presents the group as “big stars” and boasts of Bubble Gum’s long tour to the four corners of the world where they are in high demand from countless fans and where they are protagonists in amazing adventures. Then, on with the show! The finale is always “Besame Mucho.” And the performers exit the stage.
For two years up until Bacca’s death, the choir gave concerts all over Italy: in Florentine squats, in