Photo by Giovanni Brunetto, graphic design by Diego Segatto.
SHUT UP. OR RATHER, SPEAK. DIARY OF A FEMINIST, 1972–1977
Shut Up. Or Rather, Speak. Diary of a Feminist, 1972–1977 is the second work in a diptych that Ateliersi dedicates to Carla Lonzi. It follows I am Armande!, which takes as its starting point the author’s final research into the Précieuses movement, which emerged in France in the mid-seventeenth century.
For Carla Lonzi, writing was always a necessary act of inquiry and authenticity. She shared this practice through poetry, manifestos and books written with the Rivolta Femminile collective, and newspaper articles. Yet it is in her diary—with its heterogeneous material of memories, dreams, letters sent and unsent, poetic passages and phone calls—that her writing fully confronts the conflicts and ambivalence of the rift between patriarchal society and the “unexpected subject” that is woman.
The decision to create a dramaturgy from Carla Lonzi’s diaries is rooted in a deep appreciation of both the literary value and the value as testimony of this body of writing. Written between 1972 and 1977 and published shortly afterwards under the title Taci, anzi parla, these texts have only in recent years begun to receive the attention they deserve from an increasingly broad readership eager to gain a closer understanding of one of the most important figures in Italian feminism.
To enter Carla Lonzi’s diaries is to witness a woman’s intimate history—her confessions, her view of the world, her loves, conflicts, revelations and provocations—while finding ourselves at the heart of our collective history: that of Italy in the 1970s, with its events and revolutions, in which Lonzi played a decisive role.
More than a thousand pages of Lonzi’s thought and experience are reworked in the performance into a montage that, in just over an hour, seeks to make room for the encounter—unique each time—between past and present.
Credits
By: Carla Lonzi
Concept and direction: Fiorenza Menni
Dramaturgy: Sara De Simone and Caterina Venturini
Historical consultant: Lorenza Moretti
With: Fiorenza Menni, Sara Bertolucci, Meike Clarelli
Vocal direction and composition: Meike Clarelli, in collaboration with Sara Bertolucci and Davide Fasulo
Sound design and electronics: Vincenzo Scorza
Costume design: Federica De Pascalis, costumes made by Angela Fuschini
Artistic co-direction: Andrea Mochi Sismondi
Communication and promotion: Tihana Maravic
Administration: Greta Fuzzi
Technical direction: Giovanni Brunetto and Vincenzo Scorza
Thanks to: Claudia Durastanti, Battista Lena, Fondazione Lelio e Lisli Basso Onlus–Fondo Carla Lonzi, Patrizia Veronesi, Piero Venturi and Le Core
Produced by: Ateliersi
Co-produced with: Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT / Teatro Nazionale
With support from: Megera APS
With funding from: Ministero della Cultura, Regione Emilia-Romagna and Comune di Bologna
Director’s Notes
“The performance begins in the present, gradually immersing the audience in the atmosphere of the consciousness-raising practices of feminist collectives in the late 1960s and the 1970s. The present remains a threshold, a point of departure and return, while the stage work opens a path through the shared memory of those experiences.
The transformation unfolds gradually through the set, lighting and costumes, which shift towards the aesthetic of the rare black-and-white photographs documenting the consciousness-raising meetings of Carla Lonzi and the Rivolta Femminile collective. The performance creates an atmosphere of shared listening and speaking in which the three performers weave together their voices, song and words, embodying a relational practice grounded in profound mutual attentiveness and collective inquiry.
On stage, the performers’ bodies settle into comfortable postures that allow thought and relationships to unfold. Postures of listening, reflection and being together in a shared space. Through these simple, everyday, intimate postures, which resist spectacle, the possibility of shared thought takes shape.
Finally, we gradually re-emerge into the present. This return reveals the meaning of the journey: the practice of consciousness-raising evoked on stage continues to question the present.” (Fiorenza Menni)
Bio
Ateliersi is recognised for a theatrical language that transforms material drawn from reality through poetic and musical recomposition. Working in theatre and the performing arts, the collective creates artistic projects and curates the cultural programme of Atelier Sì in Bologna. Its work encompasses theatre productions with original dramaturgy and artistic interventions in which performance enters into an organic dialogue with anthropology, literature, music and the visual arts. Through this dialogue, Ateliersi seeks to communicate ideas that engage with contemporary concerns and perspectives, creating meaning around the upheavals unfolding in the world. Its anthropological approach to art is characterised by an attraction to otherness, a particular interest in cultural evolution as a subject of study, an emphasis on context and experimentation with interdisciplinary practices.
Sara Bertolucci (1994) is a singer, performer and vocal artist working in the live arts. She undertook advanced training at the Socìetas Institute for Research and Applied Art and at Malagola – International Centre for Voice Studies. Exploring the relationship between voice and landscape, she was an artist in residence at Mols Bjerge (Denmark) for Curious Encounters, and her work has received support from the C.M. Lerici Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm (Sweden). Other organisations that have supported her work include Santarcangelo Festival (Italy), Centro di Residenza dell’Emilia-Romagna – L’arboreto – Teatro Dimora di Mondaino / La Corte Ospitale di Rubiera (Italy), La MaMa International (Italy), Tenuta Dello Scompiglio (Italy) and Secret Hotel / Earthwise Residency (Denmark). Alongside her own creative practice, she works as a performer, collaborating with Aurora Bauzà/Pere Jou, Muta Imago, Teatro Valdoca and Collettivo Amigdala.
She is currently pursuing an MA in Performing Arts at Stockholm University of the Arts.
Meike Clarelli is a singer, composer and vocal researcher with a diploma in Psychophonie. She founded the choirs Le Chemin des Femmes and Le Core – voci indisciplinate, won the Premio Ciampi with the project La Metralli, and is a member of Collettivo Amigdala. She also composes music for internationally renowned theatres, including Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT / Teatro Nazionale, the Centro Dramático Nacional in Madrid and the Gorki Theater in Berlin. She teaches singing and voice at ERT’s Scuola di Teatro Iolanda Gazzerro.
Sara De Simone holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. With Nadia Fusini, she translated the correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (Scrivi sempre a mezzanotte, Feltrinelli, 2023). She edited La vita della vita. Diari di Katherine Mansfield (Donzelli, 2023) and wrote the introduction to a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poems (Einaudi Tascabili, 2023). She is the author of Nessuna come lei. Katherine Mansfield e Virginia Woolf: storia di un’amicizia (Neri Pozza, winner of the 2023 Premio Rapallo Saggistica); L’atto sospeso. Azione e inazione dell’eroe dall’«Iliade» a Virginia Woolf (Viella, 2024); and Una tranquilla vita da vulcano. Una storia di Emily Dickinson (Solferino, 2025). She contributes to il manifesto and Il Tascabile and creates podcasts for Rai Radio 3. She curates the poetry programme of Inquiete Festival and is the artistic director of Eccentriche Festival. In 2025, she received the Maria Teresa Messori Roncaglia and Eugenio Mari Prize from the Accademia dei Lincei.
Fiorenza Menni is an actress, theatre director and artistic director of Ateliersi. Her theatrical practice focuses on creating original dramaturgy through an ongoing exploration of content and form, informed by philosophical studies and reflections on art. She regularly leads actor training programmes at theatres, academies and universities in Italy and abroad. Awarded the Eleonora Duse Prize for Best Emerging Actress in 2007, she performs in, directs and oversees the sound of all Ateliersi productions. In 2019, she directed La mappa del cuore di Lea Melandri, a performance centred on the writer and activist Lea Melandri; in 2022, she directed Nell’impero delle misure, inspired by the life and work of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva; and in 2024, together with Andrea Mochi Sismondi, she created We did it!, a theatrical mockumentary about climate justice.
Lorenza Moretti is a PhD candidate in Contemporary History at Sapienza University of Rome, where she researches the history of ecofeminism in Italy. In March 2022, she graduated in Philosophy from the same university with a thesis on Carla Lonzi, for which she received a Certificate of Merit in the fifth edition (2022) of the Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia Study Prize, awarded by the University of Padua. In 2024, she was a visiting researcher with the Gender Studies research group at Utrecht University’s Institute for Cultural Inquiry, and in 2025 she was a visiting graduate student in the Department of Italian Studies at New York University.
Caterina Venturini is a writer and screenwriter. Her publications include the non-fiction book Il vostro silenzio non vi proteggerà. Una storia di Audre Lorde (Solferino, 2025); the novels QUCHI. Quello che ho ingoiato (E/O, 2022), L’anno breve (Rizzoli, 2016) and Le tue stelle sono nane (Fazi, 2009); literary criticism in journals including Quaderni del 900, Nuovi Argomenti and Avanguardia; articles and short stories. Her screenwriting credits include Daniele Luchetti’s Anni felici (2013), whose screenplay was nominated for a Nastro d’Argento award.
Vincenzo Scorza is a versatile sound sculptor and live performance technician who has been active since the early 2000s. Since 2017, he has devoted increasing attention to exploring modular systems, which now form the technological core of his sound creations. His artistic practice investigates the limits of machine autonomy, seeking and creating a harmonious—or deliberately dissonant—dialogue between the human and the technological, with particular attention to the functional role of sound. A collaborator of Ateliersi since 2012, he has developed numerous sound projects, independently or alongside Fiorenza Menni, including Isola e sogna, In your face (shortlisted for the 2018 Premio Ubu), Soli, [gæp] Cos’è un GAP? Dialogo ludico sulla Liberazione, La mappa del cuore di Lea Melandri, Gipsy Lady 1646, Nell’impero delle misure, Il linguaggio degli oggetti and We did it!.
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