by Gianluca Costantini
Release date april, 2026
Format cm. 17 x 24
Hardcover : 16 pages
Publication printed in 100 copies by Tiratura in Ravenna using Risograph.
The copies are signed and numbered.
Text in Italian with translations into English and the poets’ original languages.
15,00 €
The Shieldmaiden project brings together fourteen 20th-century women poets, two from each country among Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, through a series of portraits I have created.
It is not a collection, but a geography. Not an archive, but a territory traversed by female voices that wrote against time: against censorship, exile, marginality, history.
Like the shieldmaidens of Norse sagas, these poets fight with words. Each verse is an act of resistance. Each language, a crossed boundary. Each biography, a fracture within the century.
Two per country: a minimal, almost arithmetical system to build an unstable chorus between the Baltic and Scandinavia. Yet the same obsessions return in their work: nature and memory, body and identity, loss and survival. Not themes, but underground currents.
The portraits do not illustrate: they translate. They bring poetry onto the face, reducing it to line, to essential sign, to presence. Each image is a condensation, not an explanation.
Seen together, the fourteen portraits form an archipelago. Language becomes a provisional homeland. Silence, a form of resistance. Poetry, a way of remaining alive in the world.
Fourteen faces. One single chorus.
Gianluca Costantini
Gianluca Costantini is an Italian cartoonist, comics journalist, and activist. He has contributed to numerous publications and is the author of several graphic novels, including Libia, written with Francesca Mannocchi. He is known for his drawings connected to human rights campaigns around the world.
He collaborates with organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists, ARCI, ActionAid, and SOS Méditerranée. In 2019, he received the Human Rights and Art Award from Amnesty International.
His most recent books include Zodiac, created with Ai Weiwei and Elettra Stamboulis, published in the United States by Penguin Random House, as well as Xi Jinping: The Silent Emperor and Volodymyr Zelensky – The Voice of the People, published in France by Éditions Delcourt.
