Rossella Biscotti: The Trial

"The Trial is an extensive publication chronicling the decade-plus-long evolution of one of Rossella Biscotti’s seminal works. Developed between 2006 and 2021, it centres on the “April 7th” trial (1983–84), a landmark inquiry and legal case against members of the Italian leftist movement Autonomia Operaia. The project has unfolded through installations, sculptures, performances, reading groups, films, and printed matter, presented at (among many others): MAXXI—National Museum of 21st Century Art, 2010; dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel, 2012; e-flux, New York, 2013; Wiels, Brussels, 2014; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, 2024. The core of the book is the English transcription of a six-hour audio piece, originally composed from hundreds of hours of the trial’s archival recordings broadcast by Radio Radicale. Edited like a theatrical script, The Trial becomes a polyphonic narrative that foregrounds the political voices of defendants in opposition to the structure and language of the legal machine: prosecutors, judges, lawyers. The transcript is accompanied by critical texts by Michael Hardt, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, and Giovanna Zapperi, as well as a conversation between the artist and philosopher Antonio Negri, one of the trial’s key defendants. It investigates how political memory is carried, translated, and embodied across time. Featuring visual documentation and multilingual excerpts from performances staged across various institutions and countries, this publication traces the work’s ongoing reactivation through translation, collaboration, and context-specific interventions. The Trial resists closure, offering instead a mutable framework for engaging with political history, collective memory, and the performative nature of justice. "