Movements and periods
In the beginning, there was the androgyne. A bizarre and disturbing figure, whose appearances marked moments of change and transformation in civilisation. According to the ancient Indian text Brhadranyche Upanishad, it was originally the only person, like a joined couple. The East, of which Greece was the royal gateway, intertwined the myth of the perfect and self-sufficient primordial being, with dual sexual characteristics, with that of a mythological Eros of lost wholeness, born in Plato’s Symposium. The invisible wings of our “uninhabited angel” fly today over hyper-technological progress, but also over the escape to freedom from the globalised world. An enigmatic being par excellence, the androgyne opposes the immobility of conservation in all areas of knowledge, sensing change in the air of the new millennium. After tracing the stages of this enigmatic creature’s restless journey, from Leonardo to Orlando, from contemporary cinema to fashion, the author hypothesises the slow but inexorable emergence of a change that will perhaps allow us to better understand the updated voice of the ancient dual siren that D’Annunzio, with his prophetic pen, beautifully called “La divina ambiguità” (The Divine Ambiguity).
Fonte sinòssi: Morettievitali.it
Publication date: 12 September 2025
Alessandra Cenni (Genoa, 1957) is a scholar of contemporary and comparative Italian literature, translator and essayist. She has taught and conducted research at various Italian and Greek universities and now lives in Athens. She is best known for her philological and critical work on 20th-century writers such as Antonia Pozzi and Sibilla Aleramo, whose letters and unpublished texts she has edited. She also works on gender studies and LGBTQ+ issues, recovering female and queer figures who have been erased from official history. Among her best-known works of fiction and non-fiction is Passioni e altre catastrofi (Passions and Other Catastrophes), dedicated to the writer and intellectual Lina Poletti. Her writing combines historical rigour with narrative passion.
