From 28th April to 19th May 2026, the Via Zirardini Open-Air Gallery will host SHIELDMAIDEN. VERSI CHE COMBATTONO IL SILENZIO, a project by artist Gianluca Costantini as part of the Nordic Focus programme at the Polis Teatro Festival.
Shieldmaiden brings together fourteen 20th-century female poets from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in a constellation of portraits created by Gianluca Costantini.
Not an iconographic collection, but a poetic map of the European North and the Baltic, where women’s voices traverse languages, political regimes, wars, independence movements and social transformations, rendering a unique emotional geography of the twentieth century.
Like the shieldmaidens, the warrior women of the Norse sagas who fought alongside men with courage and autonomy, these poetesses too face their own battles: against censorship, exile, marginalisation or social transformation. Their weapon is the word, and every verse becomes an act of resistance and presence.
The selected poets belong to different eras and contexts: some wrote during occupation or under censorship, others experienced exile, whilst others lived through the transformations of the Nordic welfare state and the struggles for emancipation.
The selected female poets come from different eras and contexts: some wrote during the occupation or under censorship, others experienced exile, whilst others lived through the transformations of the Nordic welfare state and the struggles for emancipation.
The fourteen portraits form an archipelago in which the viewer traverses Northern Europe not through political borders, but via poetic affinities, restoring visibility to a female memory that is often marginalised within the dominant canon.
