|
|
Look Poesia, Napoli / Naples, KGB, 1990
|
|
|
Edited by Sonia D’Alto in collaboration with Marea Art Project, Le Nemesiache: Reclaiming Mythological Rituals is the first monograph dedicated to the Neapolitan feminist and pacifist artists’ group Le Nemesiache. Co-founded in 1970 by the multidisciplinary and visionary artist and writer Lina Mangiacapre, Le Nemesiache fostered an experimental artistic practice and a way of being in the world rooted in feminism, mythology, folktales, sci-fi, and radical imagination, while also introducing “transfeminism” in the early ’80s. Throughout their long-lasting practice spanning several decades, the group retrieved an androgynous mythosophy to transcend art as mere representation and challenge the feminine as a modern identity category. Their distinct transformative approach within both Italian and Western feminist art history led not only to the emergence of an interdisciplinary practice—encompassing film, performance, writing, rituals, poetry, music, collage, costumes, protests, and conferences—but also the creation of a new political language, grounded in cosmological creativity and justice through mythological rituals.
Unpublished documents, images, photographs, and manifestos about the group are accompanied by new creative, political, and historical contributions—by Chiara Bottici, Federica Bueti, Cairo Clarke, Sonia D’Alto, Giulia Damiani, Giusi Palomba, Imma Tralli and Roberto Pontecorvo (Marea Art Project), Elvira Vannini, Giovanna Zopperi, and Arnisa Zeqo—evoking the collective joy of Le Nemesiache’s history so as to bring a sense of myth back into the world, rewriting and embodying it anew.
Below you can read an excerpt from the essay by Chiara Bottici featured in the publication.
|
|
|
BOOK LAUNCH TOUR
Le Nemesiache: Reclaiming Mythological Rituals
•
Thursday, October 16
at 6.30pm
Villa Medici, Rome
•
Friday, October 17
at 6pm
MACTE, Termoli
•
Friday, October 24
at 7pm
Centro Pecci, Prato
|
|
|
|
Lina Mangiacapre, Sorrento, 1985
|
|
The Performative Politics of Le Nemesiache
by Chiara Bottici
There is no doubt that we are in the middle of a new feminist wave. From the streets of Buenos Aires to those of Tehran, a transnational feminist movement is mobilizing bodies, ideas, and resistance among millions. The stronger the attack on what neo-fascists and neo-authoritarian populists often term “gender ideology,” the louder becomes the feminist desire “to change everything.” [1] In contrast to other waves of feminist organizing, the distinctive features of the current one include a shift toward a “transfeminist” project, namely an attempt to create bridges between the women’s movement and the LGBTQAI+ cause by: showing that they are both “second sexes” [2] in comparison to “man,” who still counts as both a specific gender and a name for the human in general; an intersectional lens, specifically a desire to situate feminist battles at the intersection between different axes of oppressions (gender, class, sexual orientation, race, and ecology, to name only a few); and a return to the subversive power of the body as a site of revolutionary potential, a potential that was eclipsed for a few decades by overemphasis on language and culture.
|
|
|
Le Sibille (still), 1977. Written and directed by Lina Mangiacapre, performance and music by Le Nemesiache, produced by Coop. Le Tre Ghinee
|
|
Looking with this scenario in mind at the work produced by the loose group Le Nemesiache, we cannot but be struck by their visionary character. The actions, images, and writings they produced in the 1970s and 1980s were in many ways ahead of their time, which also explains why this movement is overall less known than other contemporary second-wave feminist movements such as Rivolta Femminile. While in the 1970s there was a clear separation between feminism and the LGBTQ+ movement, Le Nemesiache explicitly adopted the term transfemminismo [transfeminism] to signal a more inclusive attitude. In this way, Le Nemesiache anticipated the current usage of transfemminista [transfeminist], the official terminology adopted by what is at this moment the most politically active feminist group in Italy, Non una di meno. And in their often-oneiric and dreamlike work, Le Nemesiache prefigured the reality of the current feminist transnational movement. It is not just a question of terminology, but also of conceptual apparatus. In “Il mito della donna guerriera” [The Myth of the Worrior Woman, 1988], for instance, we read: “The androgynous is a floating frontier that breaks away from the given sexual identities.” [3]
CONTINUE READING
|
|
|
“Vestizione di Didone” from the film set Didone non è morta, 1987. Photo: Melita Rotondo
|
|
[1] Verónica Gago, The Feminist International: How to Change Everything (London: Verso, 2020).
[2] While the implicit reference is to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), I have recently used the term in the plural precisely to signal that not only women, but LGBTQ+ folks as well, are “second” in comparison to straight cis men. Chiara Bottici, Anarchafeminism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2022)
[3] Angela Putino and Lina Mangiacapre, “Il mito della donna guerriera,” Mani-Festa, no. 0 (1988): 1–3. Unless otherwise noted, all original text are here translated in English by the author.
|
|
|
Mousse Magazine and Publishing
via Decembrio 28, 20137 Milan
Contact us here
|
|
|
|
