From 28 April to 19 May 2026
Via Zirardini Open-Air Gallery

Thursday 30 April
6 pm– opening with the participation of the artist and the Councillor for Culture, City of Ravenna
the evening continues at Km Mio with an APERI-POLIS to present our program



The Shieldmaidenproject brings together fourteen female poets from the 20th century, two from each of the following countries — Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — in a constellation of portraits created by Gianluca Costantini. This is not a simple iconographic collection, but a poetic map of Northern and Baltic Europe, where female voices traverse languages, political regimes, wars, independence and social transformations, recreating a unique emotional geography of the 20th century.

Like the shieldmaiden, the female warriors of the Norse sagas who fought alongside men with courage and autonomy, these poets also face their own battle: against censorship, exile, marginalisation or social transformation. Their weapon is the word, their arena the page and thought; each verse becomes a gesture of resistance and presence.

Each country contributes with two figures, creating a balance that avoids hierarchies and builds a transnational dialogue. The selected poets belong to different eras and contexts: some wrote during occupation or under censorship, others experienced exile, and still others went through the transformations of Nordic welfare and the struggles for emancipation. Common themes recur in their verses — nature, memory, language, body, identity, loss — which are reflected like lights between the shores of the Baltic and the Scandinavian coasts.

Costantini’s work does not illustrate the texts, but translates them into signs. The portrait becomes a form of listening: essential lines, strokes that seek an inner temperature rather than photographic resemblance, faces that condense complex biographies into a single expression. Poetry thus passes from words to images, from verse to physiognomy, transforming itself into visual presence.

Seen together, the fourteen portraits form an archipelago. The viewer ideally travels through Northern Europe not through political borders, but through poetic affinities. Language becomes homeland, nature becomes moral space, silence becomes a form of resistance. The project restores visibility to a female memory that is often marginalised by the dominant canon, but crucial to understanding the last century. Fourteen faces, a single chorus: poetry that takes shape in the gaze, like shields and swords of words that defend freedom of thought and feeling.


Gianluca Costantini is an Italian cartoonist, comic book journalist and activist. He has contributed to numerous publications and is the author of several graphic novels, including Lybia, with text by Francesca Mannocchi. He is known for his drawings related to human rights campaigns around the world. He collaborates with organisations such as the CPJ Committee to Protect Journalists, Arci, ActionAid and SOS Méditerranée. In 2019, he received the Art and Human Rights Award from Amnesty International. His latest books are Zodiac, created with Ai Weiwei and Elettra Stamboulis, published in the United States by Penguin Random House, and Xi Jinping, L’Imperatore del silenzio (Xi Jinping, The Emperor of Silence) and Volodymyr Zelensky – La voix du peuple (Volodymyr Zelensky – The Voice of the People), published in France by Editions Delcourt.