A poetic map of Northern and Baltic voices
The Shieldmaiden project brings together fourteen twentieth-century women poets, two from each of the following countries—Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—into a constellation of portraits created by Gianluca Costantini. It is not merely an iconographic collection, but a poetic map of Northern and Baltic Europe, where female voices traverse languages, political regimes, wars, independence movements, and social transformations, shaping a single emotional geography of the twentieth century.
Like the shieldmaidens—the warrior women of Norse sagas who fought alongside men with courage and autonomy—these poets, too, face their own battles: against censorship, exile, marginalization, or social change. Their weapon is the word, their arena the page and the realm of thought; each verse becomes an act of resistance and presence.
Each country contributes two figures, creating a balance that avoids hierarchies and fosters a transnational dialogue. The selected poets belong to different eras and contexts: some wrote during occupation or under censorship, others experienced exile, while still others lived through the transformations of the Nordic welfare state and the struggles for emancipation. In their verses, recurring themes—nature, memory, language, body, identity, loss—echo like lights across the shores of the Baltic and the Scandinavian coasts.
Costantini’s work does not illustrate the texts, but translates them into line. The portrait becomes a form of listening: essential lines, strokes that seek an inner temperature rather than photographic likeness, faces that condense complex lives into a single expression. Poetry thus moves from word to image, from verse to physiognomy, becoming a visual presence.
Seen together, the fourteen portraits form an archipelago. The viewer journeys across Northern Europe not through political borders, but through poetic affinities. Language becomes homeland, nature a moral space, silence a form of resistance. The project restores visibility to a female memory often sidelined by the dominant canon, yet essential to understanding the past century. Fourteen faces, a single chorus: poetry taking shape in the gaze, like shields and swords of words defending the freedom to think and to feel.
From April 28 to May 19
Via Zirardini Open-Air Gallery
Thursday, April 30
6:00 PM – Exhibition opening with the participation of the artist and the Councillor for Culture of the City of Ravenna
In collaboration with the Tourism Office – Municipality of Ravenna (Italy)
Exhibition on the occasion of the POLIS Teatro Festival
Publication printed in 100 copies by Tiratura in Ravenna using Risograph® eco-friendly process, on the occasion of the POLIS Theater Festival 2026.
