News of June
This month’s new testimonies come at a very delicate moment, at the dawn of the G7 meeting that saw abortion and gender identity disappeared from the final document, by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Women’s self-determination, especially with regard to reproductive rights, is under attack as perhaps never before in contemporary times, and this month we will discuss how women who do not give birth to sons and daughters for any reason are (still) viewed and judged in some parts of the world.
This is deeply rooted in patriarchal thinking: if you are a woman and do not reproduce you simply do not exist, you are of no value, you do not deserve anything.
Let us tear down this unbearable diktat, with the force of our testimonies.
We invite everyone to spread the words of the Lunàdigas around the world!
Here come the new ones included in the Live Archive, all realised in collaboration with the Fabbrica dei Gesti in Lecce, as part of the Festival Equality_ identities, arts, territories, included in the Body Awareness Practices Workshop “Nelle Trame del corpo” (In the Textures of the Body) curated by Stefania Mariano, with the women of the Cooperativa Rinascita.
For the Impossible Monologues series, we have this month the (monumental!) one of Rosa Luxemburg, performed by Lia Careddu
In the Stories section, we present two new reviews that add to our now very full Lunàdiga Library: How do I keep alive the memory of all those women who have not had a voice?, Claudia Mazzilli‘s review of Tela di taranta (Iacobelli, 2021) by Elianda Cazzorla, and the review of Libertà in vendita. Il corpo fra scelta e mercato (Turin, Bollati Boringhieri, 2023) by Valentina Pazé by Antonella Ippolito, a new pen and new voice that we have had the good fortune to meet along the way, and which takes us inside the world of ‘surrogate motherhood’, suspending judgement but putting all the cards on the table, without discounts and without rhetoric.
Antonella Ippolito, born in Palermo, has lived abroad since 2004, and in Germany since 2007. She studied classical philology and Romance literatures and is now a researcher in Romance literatures at the University of Potsdam, where she teaches French literature, combining her academic activities with writing and painting. Lunádiga, of course!
Also this year we took part in Archivissima 2024, Festival and Night of the Archives, whose theme for the 2024 edition was #passions
Ours? It is the passion to explore ourselves, in the corner of our own solitude or in the circle that binds us as friends and sisters. Consciousness, self-awareness, mutual recognition. Being a woman is not being a mother. Being a woman is the passion to tell about oneself, the passion to listen to oneself, the passion to give one’s own experience without making it an absolute. In the individual testimonies or in the circles of women recorded over the years, there are mothers, daughters, childfree and childless, workers, students, pensioners. Italian and foreign women, of different ages: generations holding hands. Is there a name for all of them? Yes, there is. It is ‘lunàdigas’.
Our contribution can be seen here.