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"Last night, the sea called us, and we, overcoming piles of garbage, chains of cars, stinking sewers, traffic bans, access restrictions, traffic lights, private roads, private beaches... finally reached it!
Now listen, listen to what we have to say, to what the sea has told us: as the terrible ocean crisis unfolds, a referendum must be held for all its inhabitants, the great issue must be addressed and resolved—there is a crisis of fauna and flora, the imperialism of the land is destroying the socialism of the sea! The divine earthly law is completely repressing the sea's inhabitants, who are now holding protests, strikes, and assemblies.
A group of dissenting fish has threatened to evacuate the entire seabed unless this law is repealed immediately. [...] We have decided to hold this poetry festival as a form of ritual to initiate discussions and proposals among the entire population about these serious problems, which concern us as **inhabitants of the earth and, above all, of a city born from a daughter of the sea, the siren Partenope.” - Le Nemesiache

"Last night, the sea called us, and we, overcoming piles of garbage, chains of cars, stinking sewers, traffic bans, access restrictions, traffic lights, private roads, private beaches... finally reached it!
Now listen, listen to what we have to say, to what the sea has told us: as the terrible ocean crisis unfolds, a referendum must be held for all its inhabitants, the great issue must be addressed and resolved—there is a crisis of fauna and flora, the imperialism of the land is destroying the socialism of the sea! The divine earthly law is completely repressing the sea's inhabitants, who are now holding protests, strikes, and assemblies.
A group of dissenting fish has threatened to evacuate the entire seabed unless this law is repealed immediately. [...] We have decided to hold this poetry festival as a form of ritual to initiate discussions and proposals among the entire population about these serious problems, which concern us as **inhabitants of the earth and, above all, of a city born from a daughter of the sea, the siren Partenope.” - Le Nemesiache

"[...] Let us invent a new, sincere, and personal way to reclaim the world's streets, to participate more authentically in the festival of nature calling us.
Intervention at Gaiola, intervention for the sea, for our sea. A different relationship with the land: no longer use, exploitation, or ownership. The relationship with the land, with roots, with culture, must be like the relationship with one's own body, imagination, physicality, and history. Reclaiming the land means seeing its destruction, pollution, and appropriation as the same destiny imposed on women. To rediscover traces, submerged continents, the sea as mother, poetry, not just nature, no longer a scientific concept that justifies exploitation, as women are reduced to mere nature for the same purpose. The sea as culture, cosmos, a realm to reclaim.”
- Le Nemesiache

"[...] Let us invent a new, sincere, and personal way to reclaim the world's streets, to participate more authentically in the festival of nature calling us.
Intervention at Gaiola, intervention for the sea, for our sea. A different relationship with the land: no longer use, exploitation, or ownership. The relationship with the land, with roots, with culture, must be like the relationship with one's own body, imagination, physicality, and history. Reclaiming the land means seeing its destruction, pollution, and appropriation as the same destiny imposed on women. To rediscover traces, submerged continents, the sea as mother, poetry, not just nature, no longer a scientific concept that justifies exploitation, as women are reduced to mere nature for the same purpose. The sea as culture, cosmos, a realm to reclaim.”
- Le Nemesiache

"[...] Let us invent a new, sincere, and personal way to reclaim the world's streets, to participate more authentically in the festival of nature calling us.
Intervention at Gaiola, intervention for the sea, for our sea. A different relationship with the land: no longer use, exploitation, or ownership. The relationship with the land, with roots, with culture, must be like the relationship with one's own body, imagination, physicality, and history. Reclaiming the land means seeing its destruction, pollution, and appropriation as the same destiny imposed on women. To rediscover traces, submerged continents, the sea as mother, poetry, not just nature, no longer a scientific concept that justifies exploitation, as women are reduced to mere nature for the same purpose. The sea as culture, cosmos, a realm to reclaim.”
- Le Nemesiache

"[...] Let us invent a new, sincere, and personal way to reclaim the world's streets, to participate more authentically in the festival of nature calling us.
Intervention at Gaiola, intervention for the sea, for our sea. A different relationship with the land: no longer use, exploitation, or ownership. The relationship with the land, with roots, with culture, must be like the relationship with one's own body, imagination, physicality, and history. Reclaiming the land means seeing its destruction, pollution, and appropriation as the same destiny imposed on women. To rediscover traces, submerged continents, the sea as mother, poetry, not just nature, no longer a scientific concept that justifies exploitation, as women are reduced to mere nature for the same purpose. The sea as culture, cosmos, a realm to reclaim.”
- Le Nemesiache

In 1969, philosopher and artist Lina Mangiacapre returned to Naples after the student uprisings of '68 and cofounded Le Nemesiache, a feminist collective named for Nemesis, goddess of retribution against hubris and injustice, against arrogance. Their goal was simple and vast: "to bring myth back into the world."
Myth, for them, represented a form of knowledge that modernity had suppressed. Intuitive, sensuous, bodily. A way of knowing, a way of fighting, and a way of building something entirely new.

What strikes me most about Le Nemesiache is that they understood that the search for beauty and the search for justice are the same search. That creativity is not separate from politics.

In 1981 they helped organise a conference attended by six hundred women — Ricostruiamo una città a dimensione donna— let's rebuild the city to female dimensions. In 1969 they were already asking: what would the world look like if women had made it? We are still asking.

In 1969, philosopher and artist Lina Mangiacapre returned to Naples after the student uprisings of '68 and cofounded Le Nemesiache, a feminist collective named for Nemesis, goddess of retribution against hubris and injustice, against arrogance. Their goal was simple and vast: "to bring myth back into the world."
Myth, for them, represented a form of knowledge that modernity had suppressed. Intuitive, sensuous, bodily. A way of knowing, a way of fighting, and a way of building something entirely new.

What strikes me most about Le Nemesiache is that they understood that the search for beauty and the search for justice are the same search. That creativity is not separate from politics.

In 1981 they helped organise a conference attended by six hundred women — Ricostruiamo una città a dimensione donna— let's rebuild the city to female dimensions. In 1969 they were already asking: what would the world look like if women had made it? We are still asking.

This film began with a question I couldn't shake: what lives inside a photograph that the frame cannot hold?

A photograph doesn't restore what time has taken. It simply attests that what we see has existed. But that wasn't enough. The woman in these images required something more, a journey inside, towards what had been excluded from the frame, what had been lost to it. ‘Valentine Veut Vivre' is that journey.

Merci encore @regionbretagne and @bretagnecinema

This film began with a question I couldn't shake: what lives inside a photograph that the frame cannot hold?

A photograph doesn't restore what time has taken. It simply attests that what we see has existed. But that wasn't enough. The woman in these images required something more, a journey inside, towards what had been excluded from the frame, what had been lost to it. ‘Valentine Veut Vivre' is that journey.

Merci encore @regionbretagne and @bretagnecinema

This film began with a question I couldn't shake: what lives inside a photograph that the frame cannot hold?

A photograph doesn't restore what time has taken. It simply attests that what we see has existed. But that wasn't enough. The woman in these images required something more, a journey inside, towards what had been excluded from the frame, what had been lost to it. ‘Valentine Veut Vivre' is that journey.

Merci encore @regionbretagne and @bretagnecinema

This film began with a question I couldn't shake: what lives inside a photograph that the frame cannot hold?

A photograph doesn't restore what time has taken. It simply attests that what we see has existed. But that wasn't enough. The woman in these images required something more, a journey inside, towards what had been excluded from the frame, what had been lost to it. ‘Valentine Veut Vivre' is that journey.

Merci encore @regionbretagne and @bretagnecinema

This film began with a question I couldn't shake: what lives inside a photograph that the frame cannot hold?

A photograph doesn't restore what time has taken. It simply attests that what we see has existed. But that wasn't enough. The woman in these images required something more, a journey inside, towards what had been excluded from the frame, what had been lost to it. ‘Valentine Veut Vivre' is that journey.

Merci encore @regionbretagne and @bretagnecinema

Writing 'Valentine Veut Vivre' required a kind of breath I didn't know I had. I found it, in large part, because others believed first. Thank you to everyone who saw something in this project before it existed, for nurturing it and me. This script belongs to all of us.

And to the women who came before me. To my mother, forever the best storyteller, whose story this is, and always was. Whose life taught me to desire, to imagine, to persist. Whose absence is everywhere in these pages. Who I am still, always, in conversation with.

And to my great-aunt, Geneviève who devoted her life to recovering lost voices, learning to read medieval texts and ancient handwriting that time had made illegible. The woman who spent decades deciphering other people's documents had left thousands of slides, hundreds of my mother and her sisters and the world around them.
Her photographs nourished every page.

Special thanks to Octavia @opalfilmsparis
@oliviertorres6868
@isacapaSimon Rolland and @peterglanz
Merci encore @regionbretagne and @bretagnecinema

Writing 'Valentine Veut Vivre' required a kind of breath I didn't know I had. I found it, in large part, because others believed first. Thank you to everyone who saw something in this project before it existed, for nurturing it and me. This script belongs to all of us.

And to the women who came before me. To my mother, forever the best storyteller, whose story this is, and always was. Whose life taught me to desire, to imagine, to persist. Whose absence is everywhere in these pages. Who I am still, always, in conversation with.

And to my great-aunt, Geneviève who devoted her life to recovering lost voices, learning to read medieval texts and ancient handwriting that time had made illegible. The woman who spent decades deciphering other people's documents had left thousands of slides, hundreds of my mother and her sisters and the world around them.
Her photographs nourished every page.

Special thanks to Octavia @opalfilmsparis
@oliviertorres6868
@isacapaSimon Rolland and @peterglanz
Merci encore @regionbretagne and @bretagnecinema

Writing 'Valentine Veut Vivre' required a kind of breath I didn't know I had. I found it, in large part, because others believed first. Thank you to everyone who saw something in this project before it existed, for nurturing it and me. This script belongs to all of us.

And to the women who came before me. To my mother, forever the best storyteller, whose story this is, and always was. Whose life taught me to desire, to imagine, to persist. Whose absence is everywhere in these pages. Who I am still, always, in conversation with.

And to my great-aunt, Geneviève who devoted her life to recovering lost voices, learning to read medieval texts and ancient handwriting that time had made illegible. The woman who spent decades deciphering other people's documents had left thousands of slides, hundreds of my mother and her sisters and the world around them.
Her photographs nourished every page.

Special thanks to Octavia @opalfilmsparis
@oliviertorres6868
@isacapaSimon Rolland and @peterglanz
Merci encore @regionbretagne and @bretagnecinema

Writing 'Valentine Veut Vivre' required a kind of breath I didn't know I had. I found it, in large part, because others believed first. Thank you to everyone who saw something in this project before it existed, for nurturing it and me. This script belongs to all of us.

And to the women who came before me. To my mother, forever the best storyteller, whose story this is, and always was. Whose life taught me to desire, to imagine, to persist. Whose absence is everywhere in these pages. Who I am still, always, in conversation with.

And to my great-aunt, Geneviève who devoted her life to recovering lost voices, learning to read medieval texts and ancient handwriting that time had made illegible. The woman who spent decades deciphering other people's documents had left thousands of slides, hundreds of my mother and her sisters and the world around them.
Her photographs nourished every page.

Special thanks to Octavia @opalfilmsparis
@oliviertorres6868
@isacapaSimon Rolland and @peterglanz
Merci encore @regionbretagne and @bretagnecinema

Writing 'Valentine Veut Vivre' required a kind of breath I didn't know I had. I found it, in large part, because others believed first. Thank you to everyone who saw something in this project before it existed, for nurturing it and me. This script belongs to all of us.

And to the women who came before me. To my mother, forever the best storyteller, whose story this is, and always was. Whose life taught me to desire, to imagine, to persist. Whose absence is everywhere in these pages. Who I am still, always, in conversation with.

And to my great-aunt, Geneviève who devoted her life to recovering lost voices, learning to read medieval texts and ancient handwriting that time had made illegible. The woman who spent decades deciphering other people's documents had left thousands of slides, hundreds of my mother and her sisters and the world around them.
Her photographs nourished every page.

Special thanks to Octavia @opalfilmsparis
@oliviertorres6868
@isacapaSimon Rolland and @peterglanz
Merci encore @regionbretagne and @bretagnecinema

Forever grateful to @regionbretagne and @bretagnecinema for supporting the writing of Valentine Veut Vivre, my first fiction feature, set in Brittany in the summer of 1968.

A film about five sisters navigating desire. About the many ways a woman can want, inspired by my mother's story. I wrote part of the script in the very house where it all took place, in the very village my mother is buried. I stared at the walls and imagined all they had heard. I listened out for secret messages in the rain.
A double rainbow over my mother's grave in the village cemetery felt like a blessing. I slept in my grandparents bed, like i used to when I needed protection. And remembered just how much I love to write with cigarettes.

Forever grateful to @regionbretagne and @bretagnecinema for supporting the writing of Valentine Veut Vivre, my first fiction feature, set in Brittany in the summer of 1968.

A film about five sisters navigating desire. About the many ways a woman can want, inspired by my mother's story. I wrote part of the script in the very house where it all took place, in the very village my mother is buried. I stared at the walls and imagined all they had heard. I listened out for secret messages in the rain.
A double rainbow over my mother's grave in the village cemetery felt like a blessing. I slept in my grandparents bed, like i used to when I needed protection. And remembered just how much I love to write with cigarettes.

Forever grateful to @regionbretagne and @bretagnecinema for supporting the writing of Valentine Veut Vivre, my first fiction feature, set in Brittany in the summer of 1968.

A film about five sisters navigating desire. About the many ways a woman can want, inspired by my mother's story. I wrote part of the script in the very house where it all took place, in the very village my mother is buried. I stared at the walls and imagined all they had heard. I listened out for secret messages in the rain.
A double rainbow over my mother's grave in the village cemetery felt like a blessing. I slept in my grandparents bed, like i used to when I needed protection. And remembered just how much I love to write with cigarettes.

Forever grateful to @regionbretagne and @bretagnecinema for supporting the writing of Valentine Veut Vivre, my first fiction feature, set in Brittany in the summer of 1968.

A film about five sisters navigating desire. About the many ways a woman can want, inspired by my mother's story. I wrote part of the script in the very house where it all took place, in the very village my mother is buried. I stared at the walls and imagined all they had heard. I listened out for secret messages in the rain.
A double rainbow over my mother's grave in the village cemetery felt like a blessing. I slept in my grandparents bed, like i used to when I needed protection. And remembered just how much I love to write with cigarettes.

Bogdanka Poznanovic’s 1970 art installation/action "Heart-Object" (Action Heart-Object).

Inside, a metronome, 80 beats per minute. ❤️

How to speak love in a storm?" Stewart Henderson's poem asks.

I keep thinking about how to speak love in the storm that is now.

Henderson's poem suggests we "walk backwards," which made me think of this great art action "Heart-object" by Bogdanka Poznanović. In September 1970, she carried a 2×2 meter heart through the streets of Novi Sad, Serbia.

How To Speak Love In A Storm?
By Stewart Henderson

How to speak love in a storm?
depends on the substance of the voice,
as the trees rage
and roof tiles smash,
where seagulls are grounded
and there is only chaos.

How to speak love in a storm?
is to put up a signpost for the lost,
as on the bitter hillside
you lie murmuring,
‘Why is this happening now?’
Exposure, like a fox,
circling your lamb’s heart.

How to speak love in a storm?
means finding the right inflection.
Not offering words and hollow prayers
but walking backwards with you
into your abandoned years.

Thank you @Padraigotuama for your Poetry Unbound @onbeing for your company in these stormy times and this poem—and to Bogdanka Poznanović and the friends she convinced to help her, for the hope, and the smile this work brings to my face.

Renowned anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis's book 'The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani' has profoundly stimulated my thinking about grief as resistance.

What struck me most: how pain-authenticated speech creates space for counter-narratives. Women's embodied testimonies establish an alternative form of truth—one that exists alongside, and often in opposition to, official state-sanctioned versions of events.

Seremetakis explores polyphony as a democratic space. Antiphony as dialogic critique. These aren't just musical structures—they're strategic frameworks for political expression. Collective voices carry greater social weight. They create an "acoustic territory" that resists containment.

I'm increasingly interested in sound as a form of resistance—how voices, particularly women's voices in mourning, claim space that cannot be policed in the same way as written or visual testimony. Sound moves. It penetrates. It refuses to be contained.
"Shrill Shriek" a new film about female lament in Greece, coming soon! BIG UP to Karina Aloupi @Kar1naa_ for producing/researching making it happen. And to @AlixJanta for her research. Photo from the Vigiakakos archive.

Renowned anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis's book 'The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani' has profoundly stimulated my thinking about grief as resistance.

What struck me most: how pain-authenticated speech creates space for counter-narratives. Women's embodied testimonies establish an alternative form of truth—one that exists alongside, and often in opposition to, official state-sanctioned versions of events.

Seremetakis explores polyphony as a democratic space. Antiphony as dialogic critique. These aren't just musical structures—they're strategic frameworks for political expression. Collective voices carry greater social weight. They create an "acoustic territory" that resists containment.

I'm increasingly interested in sound as a form of resistance—how voices, particularly women's voices in mourning, claim space that cannot be policed in the same way as written or visual testimony. Sound moves. It penetrates. It refuses to be contained.
"Shrill Shriek" a new film about female lament in Greece, coming soon! BIG UP to Karina Aloupi @Kar1naa_ for producing/researching making it happen. And to @AlixJanta for her research. Photo from the Vigiakakos archive.

Renowned anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis's book 'The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani' has profoundly stimulated my thinking about grief as resistance.

What struck me most: how pain-authenticated speech creates space for counter-narratives. Women's embodied testimonies establish an alternative form of truth—one that exists alongside, and often in opposition to, official state-sanctioned versions of events.

Seremetakis explores polyphony as a democratic space. Antiphony as dialogic critique. These aren't just musical structures—they're strategic frameworks for political expression. Collective voices carry greater social weight. They create an "acoustic territory" that resists containment.

I'm increasingly interested in sound as a form of resistance—how voices, particularly women's voices in mourning, claim space that cannot be policed in the same way as written or visual testimony. Sound moves. It penetrates. It refuses to be contained.
"Shrill Shriek" a new film about female lament in Greece, coming soon! BIG UP to Karina Aloupi @Kar1naa_ for producing/researching making it happen. And to @AlixJanta for her research. Photo from the Vigiakakos archive.

"Female lament is an attempt to articulate that unspeakable state.

It has traditionally been loud, shrill, performative, oral, repetitive, disturbing, nonlinear, inconsolable.

Its drift is against dailiness, against forgetting, against life itself, even to the point of stirring up revenge so that at least since the 6th century BC, there have been legal restrictions on its practise, with the result that it only appears in literature in disguised or sanitised form.

Often this type of lament refuses to use human syntax.

It adopts an interspecies language in which women shriek like birds or stand with arms raised, as if they've turned into trees.

And they do this not just by way of complaining, but as a means of communicating with beings which are outside time.
The dead, for example, who need to be reminded where they are. Or the gods.

So that almost inadvertently, keening speaks a kind of Esperanto in which trees, birds, corpses, gods, humans, and the earth itself can communicate across time zones." —Poet Alice Oswald

Thank you to all the people who have nourished, supported and encouraged our film "Shrill Shriek" about female lament.BIG UP to Karina Aloupi @kar1naa_for producing/researching/ making it happen. And to @alixjanta for her research. Coming soon!
Photo: Vagiakakous archive

Coming soon! My new film 'Shrill, Shriek' is a meditation on voice, memory, and the potential political power of collective grief through an exploration of female lament in Greece.

In an era when grief is sanitized and dissent crushed, this ancient and enduring practice of collective mourning offers a radical blueprint. How do we grieve democracy's collapse, our burning planet, and humanity's fracturing? In these defiant rituals, the film uncovers a path forward.

Through archive, 16mm cinematography, and contributions by renowned poets, anthropologists and artists, we reveal how these traditions weaponize mourning for our moment.

So grateful to my partner in crime on this film, producer Karina Aloupi @kar1naa_. And to curator @alixjanta for your research.Photo from the Vigiakakos archive.