Grazia Ritrovata - A Global Community Journey

Grazia ritrovata. A Global Community Journey is a project conceived and curated by Valeria Orani, founder and artistic director of 369gradi, she is a cultural curator and producer active between Italy and the United States. For many years her work has moved across contemporary dramaturgy, translation, artistic residencies, and cultural processes capable of building deep relationships with places and people.

On the centenary of Grazia Deledda’s Nobel Prize, the project approaches the writer as a presence still capable of questioning the present. Her work becomes a point of departure for new writing, translations, readings, performative actions, territorial relationships, and international connections. Desire, destiny, guilt, freedom, belonging, marginality, power, the condition of women, and the relationship between the individual and the collective: Deledda’s themes return as questions that remain open.

Sardinia is the first body of the project: land, language, memory, landscape; a space crossed by social, spiritual, political, and cultural tensions. Rebeccu, the medieval village that will become the project’s center of work for two months, will be a place of residency, listening, encounter, and creation. From there the project will extend to the partner institutions: in addition to the Municipality of Bonorva, it will involve the municipalities of Ittireddu, Giave, Borutta, and Cheremule, engaging libraries, residents, migrants, artists, scholars, and different audiences.

The process will be accompanied by an Advisory Board made up of figures from literature, translation, theater, cinema, academia, and cultural policy:

·       Stefano Albertini, professor of literature and cinema and director of Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at NYU;

·       Patrizia Asproni, cultural manager and expert in cultural heritage and cultural enterprise;

·       Marcello Fois, internationally renowned Sardinian writer and author of Quasi Grazia;

·       Frank Hentschker, director of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center;

·       Giancarlo Lombardi, professor of Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center;

·       Dino Manca, philologist and scholar of Italian and Sardinian literature;

·       Marisa Ostolani, journalist and cultural promoter connected to Deledda’s memory in Cervia;

·       Sonita Sarker, scholar of literature, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies;

·       Sanaz Toossi, playwright, screenwriter and 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner (Drama);

·       Martha Witt, English-language translator of Deledda for Italica Press.

The project develops along three lines that are not always separate from one another. The first is literary and scholarly, connected to the study of Deledda’s work, its contemporary rereading, and its local and international dissemination. The second is performative and dramaturgical: Deledda is explored through residencies, workshops, readings, writing, music, cinema, performance, and translation. The third is communal and territorial: the project takes root in the stages and communities it encounters, turning reading, voice, cooking, memory, and storytelling into instruments of universal participation.

Grazia ritrovata lives within the project’s female universe, beginning with the desire to open a dialogue with native and immigrant communities, with the Sardinian diaspora, with those who inhabit these places and those who carry them within themselves from afar. The aim is to open the discussion within a global context, through the universality of the themes addressed in Deledda’s literature and through the distinctive features of the author herself. From this point, the project seeks to recognize, through encounter itself, a global dialogue that—also by playing on the many meanings of the word “Grazia,” or “grace” - offers an opportunity to consider a possible universal form of unity, repair, listening, future, and peace.

In this direction, the journey will then move from Sardinia to New York, in conjunction with the anniversary of the Nobel Prize, through collaboration with the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center / CUNY and New York University. The work developed in Sardinia will become a platform for international exchange, open to the global community and able to bring together scholars, writers, and experts.