Nemesis

Portals: a radical reimagining of myth as collective political practice

In 1970s Naples, radical feminist collective Le Nemesiache invented the psycho-fable: a practice of ritual storytelling and performance that summoned myth, the cosmic and the body as tools for political transformation. Named after Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, the group rejected Westernised order, turning instead to the volcanic landscapes of Southern Italy – Vesuvius, the Phlegraean Fields, the Cumaean Cave – as sites of imaginative uprising where geology, archaeology and imagination converge.

In Nemesis: Cave, Eruptions And Psycho-Fables For Resistance, performance-maker, writer and researcher Giulia Damiani draws on more than a decade of conversations with members and her own artistic practice. In dialogue with Le Nemesiache, Damiani reveals the psycho-fable as an eruptive method of collective creativity – porous, ecstatic and rooted in place – and the return of myth as a force for collective futures.