Unexpressed creativity from Napoli:
Lina Mangiacapre and her collective Le Nemesiache*This is an extract from an article published in SALT. in August 2014
The text is part of a longer study on the feminist collective. This larger project is entitled 'Napoli in the Unmapped Practice of Le
Nemesiache: A Feminist Gazeetter' and was awarded the prize for the best graduating project in the Critical Writing course at the Royal
College of Art, the Critical Writing in Art and Design Award 2014.
An elf, an angel, a punk-rock celebrity, an activist, a feminist, a beauty or simply someone who made art in Napoli throughout her life.
An exhaustive portrayal of Lina Mangiacapre’s personality should include all of these attributes and more. Although her artistic and
political practice drew much attention in the seventies and eighties, at present the products of her feminist theories are almost totally
disregarded. An archive in Napoli filled with documents, historical actions, a thirty year long artistic production as well as Mangiacapre’s
fascinating personality wait to be given new life.
Lina Mangiacapre was born in a flat in the centre of Napoli in 1946. From here, she
moved to Rome in 1965 to study philosophy at university; she returned to her hometown just after graduating. The participation in the
life of the city of Napoli was, in fact, always her main concern. In a 1988 interview, she documents the relation to her city: ‘for an artist,
Napoli is her daily bread’. Mangiacapre moved to the house number 308 in via Posillipo - a residential area located on the northern coast
of the Gulf of Napoli- in the early seventies, converting a space on the sixth floor of the building into her personal base and studio in
Napoli. She started off her career as a painter with an exhibition in a gallery near Piazza Plebiscito in the city in 1965. From then
onwards, she will be a consistent presence in the Neapolitan art scene, and a fiery promoter of political and artistic interventions.
Not only was it the address of the artist, number 308 was also home to the meetings, discussions and major activities of the feminist
collective founded by Mangiacapre in 1970, Le Nemesiache.
© 2014 Giulia Damiani
