From matriarchy to AI, Luciana Percovich at Unical leads women's circles

Does it make sense today to go back to talking about matriarchy, resistant ancestors, mutant languages, new expressions of feminism, archaic futures, as if the 1970s had never really passed? What is the connection between the women of our time and the wisdom of Crona, the myth of Demeter, circles, witches and self-consciousness? "Talking about it today makes more sense than before, because women's history is kept at the margins, and the natural family is still at the centre of the debate, but all immersed in the Western social construct with its inequalities. Five thousand years of patriarchy and a system of domination and exploitation that has yet to be disarticulated. We have set out on a path of profound change, not just emancipation, but the road is long'.

Aware of the gaps yet to be filled, of the horizons yet to be opened up, Luciana Percovich, a writer of Gorizia origin, one of the ideologues of the feminist movement, founder in 1974 of Milan's first counselling centre in the working-class Bovisa district, a linguist with anthropological inclinations and mystical hints, has words of the future for the audience at the University of Calabria: many - mostly women - in the space of the Single Guarantee Committee, participate in a two-day conference and sharing ritual to give space to the female question in terms, however, of relationships, listening and sisterhood.

A eulogy of the matriarchy, of 'matricentric' civilisations, governed by grandmothers (Crone, the wise), mothers, daughters, granddaughters, reinterpreted in a contemporary key: a cultural and philosophical proposal based on care, peace and harmony, in tune with nature and the laws of the cosmos. A 'maternal', more equitable and sustainable model that recalls distant societies such as the Mosuo in China, the Minangkabau in Indonesia or indigenous American cultures.

The event, promoted by Unical's Women's Studies centre (to which the departments of Sociology and Political Science, Philosophy, Economics and Statistics, Legal Sciences, and Linguistics adhere), in collaboration with various associations in the area, followed the traces of Percovich's latest book "Guardiane della Soglia", published with Venexia, and "Cronario, parole mutate e mutanti" (Vanda edizioni), a dictionary for imagining different futures, written by Anonima Crone, a women's collective of which the Gorizia-born writer is a member together with Eleonora Ambrusiano, Paola Broggi, Stefania Girelli and Roberta Fenci, present at Unical.

'Today more than ever it is words that can build egalitarian social forms,' the writer continues, 'in language the possibility of the future is opened or closed. The word as principle. And the principle is the mother'. Rewritten in the pages of Cronario is the sense of right, of gift, of mother, of trust. 'It was necessary. Because we deluded ourselves, but the system so far is nothing but a plutocracy. Even artificial intelligence is in danger of becoming a male tool if, for example, women are excluded from the databases. We still have to decolonise our consciences and always ask the other, do you speak or are you spoken?".