Vergine was driven by an interest in current actualities and a "desire to be in the midst of what is happening";[6] Attentive to the new trends in the art scene of her city, in 1963 she wrote Undici pittori napoletani di oggi (Eleven Neapolitan Painters of Today),[7] a text that collected the work of artists including Emilio Notte, Vincenzo Ciardo, Giovanni Brancaccio, Domenico Spinosa, Corrado Russo, Raffaele Lippi, Armando De Stefano, Renato Barisani, Carlo Alfano, Carmine Di Ruggiero, and Gianni Pisani, with a preface by art critic Giulio Carlo Argan.
In the capital she was able to deepen her relationship with Giulio Carlo Argan and get to know Palma Bucarelli, director of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rossana Rossanda, Bruno Zevi and Fabio Mauri.
[22] She continued her collaboration with Radio3 and began to write articles for periodicals and newspapers such as Il Tempo illustrato, Paese Sera, and for the international avant-garde art magazine Metro, at the invitation of her friend Gillo Dorfles.
[24] It featured works by Ay-O, Gianfranco Baruchello, Gerardo Di Fiore, Bernard Höke, Tetsumi Kudo, Otto Muehl, Gianni Pisani, Alina Szapocznikow, and Curt Stenvert, "desecrating and irritating objects (deep down)",[25] united by their challenge to social conventions.
The exhibition triggered strong criticism for the crudeness of the works on display, as testified by the words of the journalist Cesare Garboli in Il Mondo: "When you leave ... after the visit, looking for a taxi, you don't know what depressed you more, whether the horror of the revolting, scandalous novelties, or a decrepit piety, on the contrary, domestic and vulgar.
[30] Il corpo come linguaggio reviews performances and actions by sixty artists, including Gina Pane, Gilbert & George, Urs Lüthi, Katharina Sieverding, Rebecca Horn, Trisha Brown, and Günter Brus.
In addition to the introductory essay, the book (published in Italian and English) includes a collection of texts written by the artists themselves and a substantial photographic documentation of the happenings and performances.
Il corpo come linguaggio (Skira), with a new afterword by Lea Vergine and the inclusion of artists such as Orlan, Stelarc, Ron Athey, Franko B, Yasumasa Morimura, Jana Sterbak, and Matthew Barney.
Simonetti, Fabio Mauri, Gianni Pisani, Giannetto Bravi, Adriano Altamira, Nagasawa, Emilio Isgrò, Giuseppe Trotta, Fernando Tonello, Baratella, Duccio Berti, Mimmo Rotella, Franco Ravedone, Neiman.
In 1975, Vergine wrote the introductory text for a portfolio of graphic works by nine Italian women artists: Carla Accardi, Mirella Bentivoglio, Valentina Berardinone, Nilde Carabba, Tomaso Binga, Dadamaino, Amalia Del Ponte, Grazia Varisco and Nanda Vigo.
Paying for'68, Arcana Editrice), a documentation of the years around 1968 where she collected and published writings by Gianni-Emilio Simonetti, Manfredo Massironi, Julio Le Parc, Piero Gilardi, Gabriele Devecchi, Daniel Buren, Davide Boriani and her life partner Enzo Mari.
She had outlined a first critical reading of the results of programmed and kinetic art in the magazine Lineastruttura,[37] later developed in the conference of 11 March 1973, within the cycle of didactic activities of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (1972–1973).
According to Vergine, "it was the last time that an international group of artists proposed an alternative programme and model of culture and practice of making art",[39] considering the movement to be much more than an exaltation of science and technology, as it re-founded the relationship between the individual and society.
[44] The operation contributed significantly to the diffusion of Rama's work, whose first solo exhibition, set up in 1945 at the Opera pia Cucina malati poveri in Turin,[44] was closed by the Nazis for outrageousness.
[45] The catalogue of the exhibition,[46] includes contributions by Lea Vergine, the writer Giorgio Manganelli, the musicologist Massimo Mila, the poet Edoardo Sanguineti, a critical anthology collected by Corrado Levi and an unpublished "homage to Carol Rama" by the composer Luciano Berio.
[50] In the upper balcony of the PAC, eleven large-format works composed of heterogeneous materials such as drawings, found objects, photographs of actions, glasses and toys were exhibited.
"[50] The exhibition catalogue[47] contains the curator's essay entitled "Il corpo diffuso" , the text "Couleur-blessure" by Giorgio Manganelli, an interview with the artist and a critical anthology.
The exhibition, curated by Lea Vergine and installed by Achille Castiglioni, focused on twenty-three young artists, born between about 1955 and 1960, who during the mid-1980s worked using a vocabulary of abstract or geometric forms.
Quando i rifiuti diventano arte, inaugurated on 11 September 1997 in the two museums of the MART in Trento and Rovereto, was presented by the curator Lea Vergine as a "parade, a disbandment of apparitions, metaphors and memorial epiphanies"[52] starting from the beginning of the 20th century and ending with the research of the 1990s.
The theme of the recycled object had already been addressed during the early twentieth century, as in Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau (1923–1948) or Marcel Duchamp's Urinal (1917), with the aim of making less elegant materials "art".
During the twentieth century there were various motivations that pushed artists towards discarded materials, from social denunciation to simple irony, and that led to the birth of a culture of what is usually considered ugly or useless.
[54] Artists: Eileen Agar, Agullo, Arman, Roberto Marcello Baldessari, Giacomo Balla, Lewis Baltz, Gianfranco Baruchello, Bizhan Bassiri, Gabriella Benedini, Joseph Beuys, Umberto Boccioni, Christian Boltanski, Giovanna Borgese, Enrica Borghi, Louise Borgeois, Giannetto Bravi, George Brecht, Stuart Brisley, Alberto Burri, Carlo Carrà, Enrico Cattaneo, Maurizio Cattelan, Alik Cavaliere, Carla Cerati, César, Ettore Colla, Isabella Colonnello, Primo Conti, Joseph Cornell, Claudio Costa, Tony Cragg, Mario Cresci, Walter Dahn, Sergio Dangelo, Fortunato Depero, Fabio De Poli, Niki De Saint-Phalle, Gérard Deschamp, Giuseppe Desiato, Erik Dietman, Gerardo Di Fiore, Vladimir Vladimirovič Dimitriev, Mark Dion, Willie Doherty, Gerardo Dottori, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Filliou, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Lucio Fontana, Raffaella Formenti, Hannes Forster, Cesare Fullone, Mario Giacomelli, Robert Gober, Ferdinando Greco, Raymond Hains, David Hammons, Al Hansen, Mona Hatoum, Anthony Hernandez, Tom Egil Jensen, Mimmo Jodice, Paul Joostens, Tadeusz Kantor, Allan Kaprow, Kcho, Imre Kinsky, Alison Knowles, Jiri Kolár, Jannis Kounellis, Dmitri Kozaris, Annette Lemieux, Giorgio Lotti, Uliano Lucas, George Maciunas, Jackson Mac Low, Man Ray, Piero Manzoni, Giuseppe Maraniello, Marca-Relli, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Eva Marisaldi, Eliseo Mattiacci, Fabio Mauri, Paul Mc Carthy, Mario Merz, Joachim Ogarra, Charlotte Moorman, Otto Mühl, Ugo Mulas, Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Louise Nevelson, Giulia Niccolai, Cady Nolan, Gastone Novelli, Ron O'Donnel, Catherine Opie, Meret Oppenheim, Orlan, Gabriel Orozco, Nam June Paik, Claudio Parmiggiani, Pino Pascali, Luca Maria Patella, Jacques Pavlovsky, Michel Paysant, Nicola Pellegrini, Irving Penn, Lorenzo Pepe, Tullio Pericoli, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Ivan Pougny, Enrico Prampolini, Louie Psihoyos, Carol Rama, Robert Rauschenberg, Raffael Rheinsberg, Rosanna Rossi, Mimmo Rotella, Nancy Rubins, Sabrina Sabato, Tom Sachs, Salvatore Scarpitta, Christian Schad, Carolee Schneemann, Herbert Schürmann, Kurt Schwitters, Andres Serrano, Gino Severini, Cindy Sherman, Ardengo Soffici, Daniel Spoerri, Fausta Squatriti, Jana Sterbak, Erika Stocker, Varvara Stepanova, Antoni Tàpies, olfgang Tillmans, Jean Tinguely, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Matilde Trapassi, Richard Tuttle, Franco Vaccari, Nanni Valentini, Ben Vautier, Vedova-Mazzei, Jacques Villeglé, Volt (Vincenzo Fani Ciotti), Else Von Freytag-Loringhoven, Wolf Vostell, Barbara Watson, Robert Watts, Walter Weer, Richard Wentworth, Franz West, Mike Yamashita, Rougena Zátková, Gilberto Zorio.
In the exhibition catalogue, she describes the choice of theme as follows: "in the shadows we can project mirages, visions, fears, desires, the unspoken; people we have never met, places we have never been, reverberations of situations and events we may never have experienced: in short, dreams.
"[55] Artists: Mario Airò, Doug Aitken, Carlo Alfano, Laurie Anderson, Stefano Arienti, Luciano Bartolini, Carlo Benvenuto, Barbara Bloom, Christian Boltanski, Fabrizio Corneli, Gino De Dominicis, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Ceal Floyer, Alberto Garutti, Ann Hamilton, Mona Hatoum, Gary Hill, Joan Jonas, Nino Longobardi, Urs Lüthi, Fabio Mauri, Sebastiano Mauri, Ottonella Mocellin & Nicola Pellegrini, Tracey Moffat, Margherita Morgantin, Marvin E.. Newman, Cornelia Parker, Claudio Parmiggiani, Gianni Pisani, Markus Raetz, Annie Ratti, Rosanna Rossi, Anri Sala, Susanne Simonson, Jana Sterbak, Fiona Tan, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, Francesca Woodman.
[56] The exhibition design, conceived by Antonio Marras and curated by Paolo Bazzani, aimed to transport the spectator into a retro atmosphere through sculptures, paintings, books, drawings, editorial graphics, photography, furniture, as well as textiles and jewellery.
Tra Decadentismo e Modern style, containing a text by the curator and bio-bibliographical files of the authors and groups on display: Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Roger Eliot Fry, Omega Workshop, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Vorticism, the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton, and William Walton.
Vergine wrote for culture and society magazines L'Europa letteraria (1965), L'Europeo (3 November 1978), the Tuttolibri (1980–1989) Sunday supplement to the daily La Stampa, Panorama (1981–1988), L'illustrazione Italiana (August 1986), and Vanity Fair (1990–1991).