Damiani, Giulia. 2022. Porous Places, Eruptive Bodies: The Feminist Group Le Nemesiache in 1970s and 1980s Naples. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

This practice-based PhD is the culmination of a seven-year conversation with the feminist group of artists Le Nemesiache from Naples. The thesis explores this Southern Italian approach to feminism through a feminist situated and embodied methodology which utilises ‘fictioning’. The term ‘fictioning’ addresses both Le Nemesiache’s reinvention of their location and the fabulation of alternative worlds from sites of Le Nemesiache’s actions in the thesis and practice. The perfor-mances and exhibition propose how Le Nemesiache’s consciousness raising method ‘the psycho-fable’ unlocks intergenerational transmission and feminist creativity today.

The archeological and geological landscape of Naples affected the group’s femi-nism, and the psycho-fable intersected with their sense of place, their use of ritual performances and mythology. Through her investment in sites such as the aban-doned factory Italsider in films and poems, Lina Mangiacapre, founder of the group, decried the ecological devastation of the area. By focusing on local mytho-logical figures such as the Cumaean prophetess, the group revealed untold sto-ries of women’s power. Mythology emerges as Le Nemesiache’s form of feminist fictioning which denounces the division of humans from the environment perpet-uated by Western logic and capitalism, a position shared by ecofeminists. Le Nemesiache’s deep-layered investment in their location was achieved through ritual actions: in the 1977 film The Sibyls bodies and places are showed as inter-connected and porous. In their association with the erupting volcano Vesuvius which represents an ‘epistemic rupture’ (Serenella Iovino), porous eruptive bod-ies and places can shake the patriarchal status quo.

Le Nemesiache’s storytelling constitutes a repertoire of ephemeral embodied knowledge (Diana Taylor) which can be transmitted further through performance. Finally, taking cue from their prophetic invocation of the destructive properties of lava in their realisation of a feminist Naples, prophecy is proposed as a specula-tive performative practice that carries on channeling an ‘erupting’ desire to imagine and be in the world differently.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00031921
Additional Information:	Redacted version of thesis made available. Access to the full version containing third party copyrighted material is restricted.
Keywords:	feminism, myth, landscape, ritual, performance, fictioning, transmission, prophecy,psycho-fable, Naples, Southern Europe, Italy, situatedness, embodiment, porousness, practice research
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Art
Date:	31 May 2022
Item ID:	31921
Date Deposited:	17 Jun 2022 10:26
Last Modified:	07 Sep 2022 17:19
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/31921

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