Carla Lonzi (b. 1931, Florence; d. 1982, Milan) was an art critic and feminist activist best known for her work with Rivolta Femminile, a feminist collective created in 1970. Following the publication of Autoritratto ('Self-portrait') in 1969, Lonzi published Manifesto di Rivolta femminile (1970), Sputiamo su Hegel. La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale e altri scritti (1974) and Taci, anzi parla. Diario di una femminista (1977). Due to her uncodified practice, she occupies a singular position within post-war Italian politics and art, and is a crucial figure of European feminism.
Self-portraittrans. Allison Grimaldi Donahue
£ 13.99
Self-portrait
Carla Lonzi
trans. Allison Grimaldi Donahue
Recorded and transcribed throughout the 1960s, Carla Lonzi’s Self-portrait ruptures the narration of post-war modern art in Italy and beyond. Artmaking struck Lonzi as an invitation to be together in a ‘humanly satisfying way’, and this experiment in art-historical writing is a testament to her belief. Lonzi abolishes the role of the critic, her own, seeking change over self-preservation by theorising against the act of theorising.
Afterword by Claire Fontaine.
Shortlisted for the 2022 ALTA Italian Prose in Translation Award.
- 978-1-9164250-8-8
- 105 b&w illustrations
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 364 pp.
- Paperback
- 15 November 2021
About the author
About the translator
Allison Grimaldi Donahue (b. 1984, Middletown, Connecticut) is the author of Body to Mineral (Publication Studio Vancouver, 2016) and the co-author of On Endings (Delere Press, 2019). Her writing and translations have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Words without Borders, Flash Art, BOMB, NERO and Tripwire, and her performances have been presented in Italy at Gavin Brown's enterprise, MAMbo, MACRO and Short Theatre. She is a 2021–22 resident of Sommerakademie Paul Klee, Bern. She lives in Bologna.
Endorsements (1)
Before she spurred everyone to spit on Hegel, Carla Lonzi arranged her Self-portrait in the form of a dialogue recorded with friends – artists – with whom she had been in conversation for years. She wanted to feel less alienated, to figure out a way for art to be a part of living, not a stupid contrivance to be consumed. Soon after the book was published, in order to continue to ‘live life in a creative way, not in obedience with the models that society proposes over and over’, she abandoned art criticism, but not art – and never life.
Press (13)
Carla Lonzi's Self-Portrait, with Allison Grimaldi Donahue and Giulia Crispianirile* books podcast09/07/2022
A Sense of Exclusion: An Excerpt from Carla Lonzi’s Autoritratto (Self-Portrait)Los Angeles Review of Books13/03/2020
Another Sun
£ 11.99
Another Sun
Françoise Vergès Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro
In 2005, Françoise Vergès published a book with Aimé Césaire, in which she recorded – three years before his death – powerful remarks by the poet, as incisive and combative as ever, yet imbued, as always, with the universal humanism to which he had remained committed throughout his life. It is fortunate that, drawing inspiration from this interview, Another Sun allows us to hear, in their intertwining, the voices of Césaire and Vergès herself, conveying a message of emancipation and fraternity/sorority that our world needs to hear today.
Waiting at Martinique Aimé Césaire International Airport, in the city of Le Lamentin, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro browses the airport kiosk. Alongside books by Césaire, it offers titles by Frantz Fanon, Maryse Condé and Patrick Chamoiseau. She picks up a copy of Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai, a conversation between Françoise Vergès and Césaire published in 2005, and embarks. In Another Sun, Rodríguez Castro and Vergès revisit that seminal conversation, resulting in an eclectic text shaped by ongoing struggles.
With poems by Danielle Legros Georges, Wole Soyinka, Ishion Hutchinson, Clarisse Baleja Saïdi, Aimé Césaire and Jean Érian Samson.
- 978-1-0684395-2-0
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 100 pp.
- Paperback
- 04 June 2026
About the authors (2)
Françoise Vergès is a writer, decolonial anti-racist feminist and curator. She is currently working on the fabrication of premature death, imperialism and anti-imperialism, the colonial roots of fascism, private property and racism. In parallel, she is working on a film about communist anti-colonial struggles on Réunion and in the Southwest Indian Ocean based on her parents’ personal archives and her own. Her recent publications include: Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism (2024); A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum (2024); A Decolonial Feminism (2021); The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (2020); and Resolutely Black: Conversations with Françoise Vergès, with Aimé Césaire (2019). She has written documentary fifilms on Maryse Condé and Aimé Césaire (both 2013) and was a project advisor for Documenta11 (2002) and La Triennale de Paris (2012). Vergès is currently senior research fellow at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, University College London.
Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro is a writer and editor. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Freie Universität Berlin in 2018, recipient of a fellowship with Anne Waldman at Naropa University in 2019, and a textual residency fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2025. Her essay ‘El nuevo sublime’ was a finalist for the National Essay and Criticism Award in Colombia in 2019. Rodríguez Castro is the editor of Dream of Europe: Selected Seminars and Interviews, 1984–1992 (2020), a collection of previously unpublished lectures by Audre Lorde, which was shortlisted for the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. She is also the author of The Echo (2025) and Blood (2026).
