Book launch and film screening with Sonia D’Alto and Marea Art Project.
Le Nemesiache: Reclaiming Mythological Rituals, curated by Sonia D’Alto, is the first monograph dedicated to the Neapolitan feminist, pacifist, and artist group. Founded in 1970 by philosopher, writer, and multidisciplinary artist Lina Mangiacapre, Le Nemesiache embodied an experimental artistic practice and a way of inhabiting the world rooted in feminism, mythology, folktales, science fiction, and radical imagination. The result is a practice deeply rooted in the local territory, which includes protests and the occupation of buildings, articulating a form of feminism that, drawing from the genealogies of Southern Italy, fosters solidarity among the oppressed across diverse contexts.
Published by Mousse Publishing and produced in collaboration with Marea Art Project, with the support of the Italian Council (13th edition), the book is the result of Sonia D’Alto’s research and her long-term work within the archive of Lina Mangiacapre and several participants of the collective.
The bilingual volume (Italian and English) brings together previously unpublished documents, photographs, and posters, giving special prominence to images depicting preparatory or intimate moments that highlight the processual and collective nature of their work.
The archival materials are accompanied by historical, theoretical, creative, and political contributions commissioned by the author, Sonia D’Alto, and written by D’Alto alongside Chiara Bottici, Federica Bueti, Cairo Clarke, Arnisa Zeqo, Giulia Damiani, Giusi Palomba, Elvira Vannini, and Giovanna Zapperi.
A reasoned chronology and a selection of archival fragments intertwine with contemporary reflections ranging from ecological spirituality to the historical reconstruction of feminist solidarity networks, from transformative justice to queer artistic theories, touching as well on the Southern Question, from Italy to the Mediterranean.
The presentation of the publication at ifa Gallery Berlin will feature Marea Art Project and author Sonia D’Alto, who will retrace the process of engaging the contributors and present a selection of archival images from the project, offering insight into significant moments in the collective’s long history.
The evening will include a screening of Le Nemesiache’s experimental Super 8 films from the 1970s, rarely shown documents of their collaborative, feminist approach to cinema.
In the 1970s, Lina Mangiacapre and the Neapolitan feminist group Le Nemesiache created Super 8 short films, exploring not only forms of collaborative cinema but also the extension of the feminist practice of consciousness-raising into public space, and the use of myth to reinvent cinema as a collective ritual and as a form of expanded cinema.
The project was made possible thanks to the support of the Italian Council programme (2024), promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
Film Programme
Antistrip, 1976
Video still, Super 8, color, sound, 20’
Directed by Lina Mangiacapre/Nemesi, music and performance of Le Nemesiache, produced by Coop. Le Tre Ghinee/Nemesiache
Antistreap takes place in an intimate setting: the home of Lina Mangiacapre in Posillipo (Naples). Here, the Nemesiache stage a drag and burlesque cabaret, playing with identities, disguises, and striptease, accompanied by a sonic pastiche that intertwines Flying Lesbians, Patty Pravo, Neapolitan songs, and Iranian melodies. The atmosphere, suspended between myth and rebellion, culminates in Lina’s performance at the piano: a gesture of liberation in which the body dissolves into music and space. Play thus becomes the key to accessing a new harmony, where difference can be expressed, social and sexual roles abandoned, gender binarism overcome, and the collective joy and exuberance of desires shared.
Autocoscienza [Consciousness- raising], 1976
Video still, Super 8, color, sound, 15′
Directed by Lina Mangiacapre/Nemesi with Teresa Mangiacapra/Niobe and Bruna Felletti/ Karma
Short film by Lina Mangiacapre/Nemesi, made together with Niobe and Karma and shot without editing. The camera becomes a third eye – the eye of Parthenope, the mythical Siren– capturing Niobe’s psycho–fabulous dances and gestures among the ancient temples of Paestum, revealing “a woman who wants to claim her own territory: world, sky, sea, sun, moon; her territory of cinema as an image of herself. To give birth to the world also with her eyes and hands, a world of life.” The camera moves through the symbolic places of the Nemesiache’s experience: Paestum, during the 1976 feminist gathering they organized; the Gulf of Naples and Vesuvius; the interiors of Lina’s home in Posillipo; the fumaroles of the Phlegraean Fields.
Biographies
Sonia D’Alto
Sonia D’Alto is a researcher, curator, writer, and occasional editor. She is currently a practice-based PhD candidate at HFBK Hamburg and teaches in the Curatorial Studies department at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Ghent (KASK). She has collaborated with numerous artist residencies, art institutions, and academic programs across Europe, and has been part of various collectives. Her texts have appeared in publications such as e-flux journal, NERO, Flash Art, Mousse and Critique d’Art.
Marea
Marea Art Project is an international research and artist residency program founded in 2021 on the Amalfi Coast by art historian Imma Tralli and cultural manager Roberto Pontecorvo.
The project aims to broaden perspectives on the region so that, from a place of temporary consumption, it may once again become a site for research, experimentation, and contemporary artistic production overlooking the Mediterranean.
