Follia come Poesia [Madness as Poetry], 1977-79
Short film, Super 8, color, sound, 40’
Written and directed by Lina Mangiacapre, with performances and music by Le Nemesiache, in collaboration with women institutionalized at the Frullone Psychiatric Hospital and its director. Produced by Coop. Le Tre Ghinee.
Emerging from a three-year collaboration with women at the Frullone Psychiatric Hospital and its director, Sergio Piro, the film develops a collective reflection on institutional confinement and practices of self-determination. Le Nemesiache accompany the women patients to the seashore, transforming the hospital into an open environment that resists processes of medical psychiatrisation. Bathing, dancing, music, and collective listening unfold within a shared performative horizon where psycho-fable, psycho-music, and psycho-cinema become tools for relation, liberation, and self-narration. The film ultimately proposes an alternative, cosmic understanding of care, grounded in creative expression, poetry, and embodied presence.
Courtesy Archivio Mangiacapre and Archivio Le Nemesiache
This film program explores visions of cosmic feminist togetherness and the more-than-human mythic force emerging through ancestral memory and cinematic entanglements. It is centred on the filmmaking practice of Lina Mangiacapre in collaboration with the feminist loose group Le Nemesiache, which she co-founded in Naples in the early 1970s. The programme brings together a selection of Super 8 short films from the 1970s linked to the “psycho-fable” and the group’s extension of consciousness-raising practices into public space, alongside feature films from the 1980s and 1990s that articulate an experimental feminist cinematic language anticipating transfeminist and queer perspectives.
Mangiacapre was a pioneer of gender-bending role-play and, together with Le Nemesiache, orchestrated the reclamation of an ecofeminist cosmos inhabited by mythological goddesses, witches, minor heroines, and cyborgs. The program foregrounds aesthetic practices of dis-identification with normative gender roles which, as “fugitive mythologies,” enable forms of becoming that overcome fixed categories of space and time, as well as gendered and linguistic enunciations. These fugitive mythologies traverse their cinema situating women and marginalized beings as subjects in transformation through whom forms of poetic justice may be imagined.
The selection spans five films, moving from collective consciousness-raising practices toward increasingly fluid and unstable configurations of identity, expressing the multiplicity of the cosmos. In Autocoscienza, the psycho-fable emerges as a cosmopoietic practice; Le Sibille reclaim a mythic female genealogy; Follia come poesia addresses forms of social marginalisation and practices of care beyond institutional psychiatry; Didone non è morta reworks classical myth from a feminist and Mediterranean perspective. The program culminates with Faust-Fausta, a film in which the disruption of traditional sexual binaries becomes a central feature of Mangiacapre’s cinematic language, alongside explorations of gender fluidity and pansexuality.
In each of these films, myth functions not as a return to origins, but as a speculative and political tool anchored in the Mediterranean context, suggesting ‘unpredictable and fantastical’ forms of collective imagination.
Lina Mangiacapre (1946–2002) was a Neapolitan writer, filmmaker, painter, journalist, and cultural organiser. In 1970 she founded Le Nemesiache in Naples, and in 1976 the Rassegna del Cinema Femminista in Sorrento (active until 1995). Her multimedia practice, informed by mythology, folktales, science fiction, and Mediterranean genealogies, anticipates transfeminist and proto-queer aesthetics.
Le Nemesiache was a feminist interdisciplinary collective active primarily in Naples, Sorrento, and the Amalfi Coast, with activities also in Rome and Paris, evolving from an informal group into a cooperative and later an association (until 2018). Their practice combined performance, poetry, music, collage, painting, costume-making, filmmaking, and public interventions, drawing on mythology, folklore, science fiction, and ecology.