Gala Farucci’s biography
by Collettivo Dolce Agonia
Gala Farucci was born on August 1st 1983 in Torino, north Italy, to tayloress Patricia Farucci and car designer Jack Singeltitt. The last of six daughters, she grows up by the fields of San Rocco, the village where she spends the first 17 years of her life.
A hyper-tempered child, she dismisses the boredom imposed by school teachers and usual conversations, as well as the jeal- ousy of her sisters: as the youngest child, also the only trans- feminine, she receives much extra attention, freedom and pro- tection from her parents than any of her older sisters. Lonesome and joyful, she soon dives into imaginary travels, friends and deeds. At the age of six years old she discovers the theatre realm through her mother, who works at the Teatro Reggio. There she finds people relatable, funny, shallow also, but warm. She develops a passion for both costumes and acting, and forgets about school.
Gala grows into a rather introvert teen, socially quiet, boiling inside. She shines on stage at the local theatre school, or at school concerts with her punk band Pecora Viola. Away from the stage, she smokes hash, draws clothes and dances on emo 1980s synthesizers. When she is thirteen a teacher refuses to let them enter the classroom unless she takes off her pierc- ings; she tells her parents she will not return to school and they find her a spot at the Torino Montessori school.
There, sex education classes reveal her to her felt gender and she swiftly imposes her chosen name, which her family and close friends smoothly welcomes.
She lets go of acting and feels increasingly drawn to dance. After a prep year, she enters the conservatory at the age of six- teen. In high school she starts to develop a strong interest and involvement in political affairs, at both local and global scale. At eighteen she enters the prestigious school La Fabricca di Menti, Torino, for a five years program in politics and public policy. After one year she experiences a nervous breakdown resulting in hospitalization. She quits both the school and the conservatory.
At the clinic she meets Lupa, another transgirl, whom she in- stantly bonds with. They mess up art therapy classes, try all drugs available at the pharmacy, and dream about future plans. They also share intimacy, first experience of trans sex for Gala. Lupa tells her about the Neapolitan Feminielli, a population of people who embody a traditional third gender role in traditional Neapolitan culture, and to a lesser extent, in the rest of Southern Italy. They help each other out of the clin- ic-prison and flee to Napoli.
The squat scene in early 2000s Napoli is as precarious as pro- tective. Gala discovers community and her fundamental need of it. Its power also. She joins grassroots association ArciTrans in 2001 for pro-sex work campaigns, starts organizing festive community events and initiates Femi Cabaretti. She also coor- dinates the distribution of hormones to trans peers (at this time, she herself is not —yet— taking any).
In this new context she reconnects with her original passion for theatre and dance and starts creating shows with her Cab- aret troupe. Most of them are epic, eerie, clownesque and somewhat tender.
Gala is scouted by a model agent at the local club Bambusa Babes. The Milanese is dazzled by her immense body, close to naked this night, and by her apparent symbiosis with the re- lentless house beat. She goes to Milan for a shooting and ob- tains her first modelling portfolio.
She's instantly booked by Dolce & Cabana for their spring-summer 2006 campaign. Its instant commercial at- tracts the industry's attention and soon Gala starts walking runways across Europe.
In the first year of this unexpected career, she manages to go home to Napoli regularly. But as success arises and cash flow abounds, she trades her emotional stability for the material one —a frustrating dilemma which she will navigate through- out her life. Homesick, she falls in love with fart mogul Nele Brunschwig during an after party in Berlin.
She leaves her squat in Napoli for good and moves to Berlin, where she enters an era of relentless clubbing financed by her modelling money. Her body reminds her of the specific state that dancing provided her with back in Napoli; she frantically dives back into it, alongside her —disastrous— relationship. She also starts indulging in psychedelics and various plea- sure-enhancing substances.
In summer 2009 she undergoes her first modification surgery. She reads "The End of Eddy", which inspires her to create her own autobiographical piece. She spends her next days of re- covery writing it, despite the heavy load of pain killers. She sends it to her friend —Edouard Louis— who requests his agent to publish it. 33 encounters an unexpected success, and within a year Gala is invited to various universities around the world.
The end of 2010 marks an abrupt turn in Gala's life: Brun- schwig breaks up, allegedly because of Gala's jealousy and un- fittedness to polygamy. She is also laid off by her model agency. At the same moment her father is diagnosed with liver cancer and dies within weeks. Her substance consumption be- comes a coping need instead of an expansion magic wand. Gala burns out and gets hospitalized for a second time in a mental institution, at Charité hospital in Berlin. She drops modelling and feels revulsed by the art world. This time around she has to receive care for three months. She starts taking new medication as a support for sustaining her intense mood shifts, attachment issues, depressive bouts and chronic anxiety.
The clinic offers dance therapy and counselling. Both make her vital drive to move and to create resurface.
She enters a long phase of recovery. She goes back home and asks her mother to teach her sewing, crocheting and knitting at a professional level. They experience the happiest days of their relationship. She also discovers meditation through Lupa, who forgave Gala's dismissal during her Berlin years and initiates her to Vipassana technique, which Gala will say "it's the most powerful tool [i] ever received to cope with this wreck of a life". After few months of grief, calm, regular medi- cation and physical reboot, she feels the drive to the stage again.
The same summer, another major turn is about to happen: the words "Fatine Radicali" appear in her mind during one her long morning meditations. Her memory brings those terms back to her, supposedly from overhearing a conversation in her past squat. She researches if they mean anything... and they do: she discovers that Fatine Radicali is a community of gender nonconforms in the Italian Alps, close to her home. She rushes there and stays for six months. Her longing for col- lectiveness is revived, as much as a creative urgency. She is in- spired to shoot a film, as a form of testimony of the first inter- national trans gathering of the commune. The film is called "Rural Trans*" and will travel the world few years later. Leaving the commune, she wants to explore video-making and make more art, more dance, more collective projects. She ap- plies to art schools with her film and a self-recorded dance solo. Goldsmiths university in London offers her a spot.
In 2012 she moves to London and starts a long phase of expan- sion. She discovers an impulse to work with sculpture and design and puts aside the video medium. Fully absorbed in her studies and new life, she enters a prolific phase of artistic creation and by the end of the program she is already commis- sioned in a few alternative and influent art spaces. She (re-)creates MAGIC COFFIN in her third year and has it shown at the Barbican Art Gallery for its annual New Talents Week.
She starts hormonal treatment the day of her arrival in London. Soon she is contacted by modelling agencies again and choses Gloss Models. She gets acquainted with the milieu in London —where she receives the nickname "Orlando"— and walks the next year outside Europe, especially in Tokyo where her size and wit quickly attract the casting directors. In London she sustains herself with modelling money and this time around she stays on her —sober— feet. *
Her contacts in the fashion world and intuitive affinity with clever art actor_esses expand the reach of her own produc- tions.
Between 2014 and 2017 she creates the trilogy YOUR MOMENT, HEE-HAW and HUMMING SOIL and dances for multiple friends' live shows, reconnecting with her stage persona. Bored by university, she drops in third year and focuses on her two careers.
*Dolce Agonia does not support the industry of luxury goods. We reject the relevance of showing in this exhibition pictures of Gala Farucci on the runways. As non-author of those images, she herself supports our decision, but requested the presence of her first and last shootings, for her friends Dolce&Cabana and Elisa Schiaparella.
At the age of thirty, she starts missing the Italian Alps and longs again for the commune. She decides to have a work hiatus and goes back to her long-time friends at the forest. She stays there again for six months, rests, visits her mother and refines her sewing skills, only rarely flying to capital cities for her show openings and major runway contracts.
A year before Brexit, she finds a convent for sale in the near countryside of Torino. She buys it without a thought and de- cides to create a collective space to create art with her friends, without pressure or specific formats. "Fate di Casa" is inaugu- rated by transfeminine cultural minister Vladimir Luxuria; Gala's chosen family joins her within weeks..
During the next few years she shows a need and will to settle down, after over a decade of international mobility.
Another life turn arrives: in 2023 Gala becomes the co-parent of two kids with her house friends. The strong desire for wel- coming children in the commune becomes reality as soon as Italy legally recognizes alternative forms of parentality. This marks the beginning of a joyful, lively, transgenerational life at Fate di Casa.
Most of Fate di Casa's inhabitants are artists, activists, street singers and dancers. Their coexistence ignites Gala's funda- mental need to perform. She decides to revisit her sculptures and to activate them into live shows, oriented towards plea- sure strategies and relational bliss on stage.
She forms the collective Veloce. They perform in village fests and a few night clubs. They use the forms of stand-up, club dancing, poetry and choir singing, interacting with Gala's decors. The collective slowly gains a certain aura, among vari- ous demographic groups.
Andrea Liuggi, curator of the PAV—Parco Arte Vivente in Torino, comes across a video of a show and sees on the screen what she had long been looking for.
After a legendary series of performances at PAV, more art in- stitutions show interest in her collective's live art proposals. By the end of the 2020s, art venues around the world offer up to 5 digit amount checks to host their shows. Gala's career and personal life experience a new great shift, as she is contacted again to model for major cosmetic brands, which now see beauty and power in ageing transfeminine bodies. This inau- gures a phase of relentless traveling again.
At home she develops a choir and hires the Belarusian voice coach Katya Zhinh full-time at Fate di Casa, to support the multigenerational choir members in their vocal development.
Simultaneously, Gala feels the need to transcribe all her per- sonal notebooks, which she dictates in an attempt to train and recover memory—the psychotropes she had to take since she was twenty years old had caused her increasing memory losses. She compiles them and releases her memoir Fino a Sat- urno, a brilliant and empowering anthem to self-definition and collective necessity. Suffering from harsh reviews, criticising the book for its erratic style, lengthy political considerations and absence of images, Fino a Saturno is a commercial flop —her close community is, on the contrary, warmly welcoming this new piece of transfeminine archive.
Nevertheless, the works of Gala and of Veloce are touring both community spaces and major cultural institution, which passed their transition phase in the mid-2020s. Gala Farucci and her collective were lucky enough that gender noncon- forming, POCs and/or neuromisfits started to get generously funded by state institutions as well as private fundations, which allowed people like her to make art with relatable peers, without having to compromise on artistic choices to sustain themselves.
The anti-ableist cultural institutions from the age of Aquarius continue their shift from a perpetuating structure in terms of demographics and artistic proposals to a multidisciplinary, multi lass, multiracial and multigendered direction, greatly enriching the westernized art production.
In 2031, Gala is commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum to create a new art piece: she builds BIG SISTER, which is excep- tionally present in this exhibition.
Gala's kids are now autonomous and have not —yet— wished to leave the communal house.