I AM ARMANDE!
Photo of Carla Lonzi courtesy of Fondazione Lelio e Lisli Basso Onlus – Fondo Carla Lonzi. Graphic design by Diego Segatto.
I can’t wait for our assembly to begin
Armande, Les Femmes Savantes by Molière
Preciousness is an effort toward distinction
from a note by Carla Lonzi
I Am Armande! [Armande sono io!] is the first creation in a diptych that Ateliersi is dedicating to Carla Lonzi, to be followed in 2026 by Shut up. Or Rather, Speak [Taci, anzi parla], based on the author’s extensive diaries. Through these two works, Ateliersi composes an autobiographical account of those years in which the personal truly became political: the life of a single woman – made up of dreams, poems, and merciless reflections on her relationships, desires, and conflicts – resonates with the lives of many other women and reflects the wider society around her.
The performance I Am Armande! is based on Carla Lonzi’s final research – interrupted by her untimely death – on the Précieuses movement, which developed in France in the mid-17th century. The book of the same name was published ten years after her death and contains the materials resulting from her research conducted in Rome, Paris, and Milan, which Lonzi considered a further chapter in the construction of feminism: three texts in which she identifies the experience of the Précieuses as a central reference point for the women’s movement, the transcript of her long dialogue with Anna Piva in 1981, and the notes from the notebooks she filled while working in the library, in close contact with primary sources.
Although unfinished, Armande sono io! is now regarded as the definitive work of Carla Lonzi’s thought. Convinced that theater reflects real situations, the author sought in the theatrical experience that specific type of relationship she observed in her own experiences, when “certain privileges are not to be granted to men”.
Initially, she looked for inspiration in the plots of classical tragedies, but it was in reading Molière’s plays Les Précieuses ridicules and Les Femmes Savantes that she saw represented the condition she was investigating. In Molière, she recognized a sensitivity that allowed her to bring the contributions of lived experience to the stage. It was in these works that she encountered the experience of the Précieuses, though ridiculed by the playwright.
“Here I found myself on the trail of the Précieuses” she writes, “and discovered that I had two very important things in common with them: the assertion of their own eroticism and the self-appointment of judgment. […] These women valued original and refined language, with proposals that sought to bring writing closer to speech. […] They made me think of self-awareness, a multitude of coincidences amazed me. I feel that many aspects, many traits, are my own. I think of the sense of the group as the bearer of a new culture shaped by the female contribution.”
In the creative process, to convey the quality of Lonzi’s research and thought, the simultaneous presence on stage of an actress and two writers is explored, resulting in a performance composed of a combination of essential elements: central passages from Molière’s works and the theatrical transposition of Lonzi’s reflections on the Précieuses and their analogies with feminism.
Credits
By: Carla Lonzi
Concept and direction: Fiorenza Menni
Dramaturgy: Sara De Simone, Caterina Venturini, Fiorenza Menni
Historical consultant: Lorenza Moretti
With: Fiorenza Menni, Sara De Simone, and Caterina Venturini
Music: Vincenzo Scorza
Voice of Armande: Sarah Saidi
Costumes for Armande: Umberta Burroni
Co-artistic director: Andrea Mochi Sismondi
Communication and promotion: Tihana Maravic
Administration: Greta Fuzzi
Technical direction: Giovanni Brunetto and Vincenzo Scorza
Tour assistant: Marica Marenna
Thanks to: Battista Lena, Fondazione Lelio e Lisli Basso Onlus-Fondo Carla Lonzi, Claudia Durastanti
A production by: Ateliersi
In co-production with: Festival dell’Eccellenza al Femminile
In collaboration with: Festival della Violenza Illustrata
With the support of: Ministry of Culture, Emilia-Romagna Region, and Municipality of Bologna
Bio
Sara De Simone holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Together 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 the introduction to the poems of Emily Dickinson (Einaudi Tascabili, 2023). She is the author of Nessuna come lei. Katherine Mansfield e Virginia Woolf: storia di un’amicizia (Neri Pozza, Premio Rapallo Saggistica 2023); L’atto sospeso. Azione e inazione dell’eroe dall’Iliade a Virginia Woolf (Viella 2024); Una tranquilla vita da vulcano. Una storia di Emily Dickinson (Solferino, 2025). She contributes to Il manifesto and Il Tascabile, and is the author of podcasts on Rai Radio 3. She is the curator of the poetry section of the Inquiete Festival and artistic director of the Eccentriche Festival. In 2025, she received the Maria Teresa Messori Roncaglia and Eugenio Mari Award from the Accademia dei Lincei.
Fiorenza Menni is an actress and theatre director. She is the artistic director of Ateliersi. Her writing for the stage aims to create original dramaturgy, the result of constant research into content and form based on philosophical studies and reflections in the field of art. She regularly conducts training courses on acting at theatres, academies and universities in Italy and abroad. Awarded the Eleonora Duse prize for best emerging actress in 2007, Fiorenza is the performer, director and sound curator of all Ateliersi’s shows. In 2019, she directed La Mappa del cuore di Lea Melandri, a show based on the writer and activist Lea Melandri; in 2022, she directed the show Nell’impero delle misure, inspired by the life and works of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva; and in 2024, she created – together with Andrea Mochi Sismondi – the show We did it!, a theatrical mockumentary on climate justice.
Lorenza Moretti is a PhD student in Contemporary History at La Sapienza University of Rome, where she is conducting research on the history of ecofeminism in Italy. In March 2022, she graduated in Philosophy from the same university with a thesis on Carla Lonzi: for this work, she received the Certificate of Merit for the Fifth Edition (2022) of the Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia Scholarship from the University of Padua. In 2024, she was a visiting researcher with the Gender Studies research group at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University, and in 2025, she was a visiting graduate student at the Department of Italian Studies at New York University.
Caterina Venturini is a writer and screenwriter. She has published the essay 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 essays in magazines (Quaderni del 900, Nuovi Argomenti, Avanguardia, etc.), articles and short stories. She was the screenwriter, among others, of Daniele Luchetti’s film Anni felici (2013), which was nominated for a Nastro D’argento award.
Vincenzo Scorza is a multifaceted sound sculptor and live performance technician who has been active since the early 2000s. Since 2017, he has devoted himself with growing interest to the exploration of modular systems, which today constitute the technological heart of his sound creations. In general, his artistic work investigates the limits of machine autonomy, seeking and creating a harmonious – or deliberately dissonant – dialogue between humans and technology, with great attention to the functional aspect of sound. A collaborator with Ateliersi since 2012, he has curated numerous sound projects, either solo or together with Fiorenza Menni, including: Isola e sogna, In your face (finalist for the 2018 Ubu Prize), Soli, [gæp] Cos’è un GAP? Dialogo ludico sulla Liberazione, La mappa del cuore by Lea Melandri, Gypsy Lady 1646, Nell’impero delle misure, Il linguaggio degli oggetti, We did it!.
Ateliersi operates in the field of performing and theatrical arts, dealing with artistic creation and curating the cultural programming of Atelier Sì in Bologna. Ateliersi’s artistic creation is recognized for a scenic writing that transfigures the data of reality through their poetic and musical recomposition. It consists of theatrical work with original dramaturgy and artistic interventions in which the performative gesture enters into organic dialogue with anthropology, literature, musical production and the visual arts to foster a communication of thought capable of intercepting restlessness and perspectives that coagulate meaning around the subversions manifested in the world. An anthropological approach to art characterised by an attraction for otherness, a predilection for cultural evolution as an object of study, the development of the contextual dimension and the experimentation of interdisciplinary practices.