We welcome curator and writer Sonia D’Alto for the launch of Le Nemesiache: Reclaiming Mythological Rituals, the first monograph dedicated to the Neapolitan feminist and pacifist artist group. The book brings together previously unpublished documents, photographs, and posters, alongside new essays that revisit the collective’s history, mythopoetic practices, and political activism.The publication is edited and co-written by Sonia D’Alto, with new contributions by Chiara Bottici, Federica Bueti, Cairo Clarke, Arnisa Zeqo, Giulia Damiani, Giusi Palomba, Elvira Vannini, and Giovanna Zapperi. Edited by Mousse Publishing and produced in collaboration with Marea Art Project and with the support of the Italian Council (13th edition), promoted by Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. 

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. 

Film programme 

Le Nemesiache are a Neapolitan collective of artists, pacifists, and feminists, founded in 1970 by the Neapolitan artist Lina Mangiacapre and active mainly in Naples, Sorrento, and the Amalfi Coast, with branches in Rome and Paris. Their interdisciplinary creative approach—encompassing film, performance, critical writing, painting, poetry, music, collage, and costumes—merged feminism, mythology, fairy tales, 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. 

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. 

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 proto-transfeminist 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′ 

Direct 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. 

Il Mare ci ha chiamate [Summoned by the sea], 1978 

Video still, Super 8, color, sound, 18’ 

Directed by Lina Mangiacapre/Nemesi, music and performance of Le Nemesiache, produced by  

Coop. Le Tre Ghinee/Nemesiache 

The short film documents a performative poetry intervention created by Le Nemesiache in June 1978. Dressed in “poetry garments,” they descend toward Gaiola, embodying an ancestral, dreamlike, and mythological dimension while denouncing the suffering of the earth, shaken by the agony of a sea polluted and scarred by human action. In solidarity with the land, the sea, and other feminist groups, Nemesi leads with the flute while the other Nemesiache, with drums and long peplos adorned with poems in gold and silver, form a spontaneous procession that reaches the sea for a festival of poetry: “Sea, culture, cosmos, a dimension to be reclaimed”.