46 Gordon
Event: “46 Gordon”
Performance at The Campus
Date: Saturday, July 19, 2025
Time(s): 12:30, 2:30, 4:30
Location: The Campus, 341 NY-217, Hudson, NY
As part of this year's 2025 Upstate Art Weekend, SEPTEMBER and The Campus, have teamed up for a special performance.
46 Gordon is a collaborative work by Nicole Cherubini and Julia K. Gleich. This seventeen-minute piece was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s seminal 1929 work, A Room of One’s Own, a cornerstone of feminist theory. The title references the address of Woolf’s drawing room, located at 46 Gordon Square in London. In addition to three scheduled performances, the installation will remain active, with performers inhabiting it throughout the day.
46 Gordon sprung from discussions between Cherubini and Gleich around sculptural space, voyeurism, and agency. These conversations coincided serendipitously with A Room of One’s Own entering the public domain, reinforcing their decision to center the work around Woolf’s essay.
Using the book’s six chapters as a narrative guide, the piece follows the fictional Napolitana—a sultry beauty, a forward-thinking intellect, and quite possibly the ghostwriter of the Surrealist Manifesto—who, after partnering with Woolf, works with her to actively radicalize the sitting room, reinhabiting a once-gendered space with agency and desire.
46 Gordon traverses time, featuring dancers in collaged Pucci-esque costumery moving from the deconstruction of the sitting room at 46 Gordon Square to the construction of an artist studio. The performance culminates in the precarious transformation of Il Napolitana’s persona into the radical embodiment of a sculpture—liberated as art yet still symbolically contained as a vessel.
The work is a contemporary interpretation of current affairs in conversation with Woolf’s text. Reexamining this essay 100 years later, amid current attacks on women's rights and freedoms, gives it a renewed relevance and urgency.
The upcoming restaging at The Campus is an extension of Cherubini's solo exhibition The Motherlode, currently on view at SEPTEMBER through August 3, and explores many of the same themes, including identity, feminist theory, and the socioeconomics of aesthetics— particularly the tension between excess and minimalist restraint the artist is known for.
The work was originally created for CounterPointe12 featuring new work by women choreographers and their collaborations with artists. 46 Gordon premiered at the Mark O’Donnell Theater in Brooklyn, March 7-9, 2025, and is Cherubini and Gleich’s second piece together: they previously collaborated with Meg Lipke on a dance that was supported by and performed at the Tang Museum in the context of Cherubini’s exhibition, “Shaking the Trees” (2020-2022).
Program Notes
46 Gordon
Danced by: Michelle Buckley, Kara Chan, Annie Freeman, Amber Neff, Ethan
Schweitzer-Gaslin
Music by: Morton Feldman, Julia Wolfe, Cristobal Tapie De Veer, Johnny Harris,
Alice Coltrane
Napolitana arrived in Paris in 1924, shortly after Mussolini was appointed Prime Minister of Italy by King Victor Emmanuel III. A sultry beauty, she was rumored to be poet André Breton's lover and muse, but in fact she was his editor, and most likely the ghost writer for the Surrealist Manifesto. Using the movement's practice of automatic writing as a guide, her original text was written without gender, from the position of the first person plural “WE”. Not surprisingly, Breton, not only assumed credit for the work, but also changed the text to the masculine singular “I” just prior to publication. It was also in 1924 that she started an active correspondence with Virginia Woolf. Although she and Woolf came from very different places with regards to class, culture, sexuality, education and economics, together, they deeply believed in radicalizing the sitting room. One did not need to abolish female space, it simply needed to be embodied with agency and desire. Together, Napolitana and Virginia collaborated on the seeds of A Room of One’s Own, the point of departure being ‘lecture as performance’, employing academic vernacular to relay oral history. Until recently, Il Napolitana was only known, in small literary circles throughout Europe and The Americas, for always wearing her fabulous signature leopard hat.
(Woolf recalled in her 1922 essay, there was no escaping the fact that everything had started at No. 46. ‘These Thursday evenings’, she wrote, ‘were as far as I am concerned the germ from which sprang all that has since come to be called by the name of Bloomsbury. And the headquarters of Bloomsbury have always been in Gordon Square.’)
Character Biography: Il Napolitana (Fictional)
Written by Nicole Cherubini
Il Napolitana.
Napolitana arrived in Paris in 1924, shortly after Mussolini was appointed Prime Minister of Italy by King Victor Emmanuel III. A sultry beauty, she was rumored to be poet André Breton's lover and muse, but in fact she was his editor, and most likely the ghost writer for the Surrealist Manifesto. Using the movement's practice of automatic writing as a guide, her original text was written without gender, from the position of the first person plural “WE”. Not surprisingly, Breton, not only assumed credit for the work, but also changed the text to the masculine singular “I” just prior to publication.
It was also in 1924 that she started an active correspondence with Virginia Woolf. Although she and Woolf came from very different places with regards to class, culture, sexuality, education and economics, together, they deeply believed in radicalizing the sitting room. One did not need to abolish female space, it simply needed to be embodied with agency and desire. Together, Napolitana and Virginia collaborated on the seeds of A Room of One’s Own, the point of departure being ‘lecture as performance’, employing academic vernacular to relay oral history.
Napolitana traveled back to Napoli in 1925. Due to her connections in Paris and London, she was instantly seen for her intellectual prowess and sophistication. She was instrumental in forming the distinguished reading group which included Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer, among other German Marxists visiting the area for inspiration and insight. Based on the essence and development of aesthetics, these meetings, which can be seen as the birth of critical theory, were lively discussions lasting deep into the early morning.
She arrived in England in 1928 to hear Woolf give her first two lectures based on their earlier thesis of and on the sitting room at the Newnham and Girton College, the first two colleges for women at the University of Cambridge. She stayed on for a bit, helping Woolf with the final edits before A Rooms of One's Own was published by Hogarth Press in Great Britain in 1929.
In the years following, during WWII, she traveled between the English countryside and Paris. Napolitana and Ithell Colquhoun were introduced by Breton in Paris in 1930 at the illustrious Café Cyrano while sipping mandarin curaçao cocktails. They instantly developed a strong bond through their similar interests in painting, occultism, poetry and writing. Napolitanas' simultaneously popular and critical cultural understanding of pleasure and beauty allowed for an expanse in Ithell’s then didactic work. There is speculation that Napolitana was an active participant and subject of many of Ithell’s Diagrams of Love, a series of watercolors and poems produced from 1939-1942 .
In 1939, She met Dora Maar at 14 rue de Halle, the home of Mary Renyolds and Marcel Duchamp in the 1st Arrondissement, Paris. Mary and Dora gathered women, artists and writers, for weekly discussions exploring agency and desire within the Surrealist movement. These meetings proved to be incredibly fertile for Napolitana and her work. Her conversations with Mary, about the political discourse of a book, as a conceptual object as well as a means of disseminating subversion, harkened back to and intensified her earlier work with Woolf. Dora and Napolitana struck up a fast friendship; they delved deeply into the dissection of photography, not as a focused surrealistic tool, but as feminist arms. And through these weekly encounters, Napolitana developed a working relationship with her “cousin” Frida Kahlo and Marcel Duchamp. Here, the three bonded on the transversive fluidity of gender. It was around this time that Duchamp found his alter ego, Rrose Selavy, Kahlo painted Self Portrait with Cropped Hair and Napolitana added the Italian masculine Il to her name, which was devoid of a patriarchal surname.
Traveling with Colquhoun and her lover, the Italian artist and critic, Toni del Renzo, Il Napolitana returned to Italy again in 1945, two years after the downfall of Il Duce, and just as women's suffrage took hold. In 1948, her “daughter”, the Italian artist, writer and filmmaker Lina Mangiacapre, was born. Lina is the founder of the radical feminist collective, Le Nemesiache in Napoli. Il Napolitana passed away on April 8, 1970 in Italy. There are no records of her birth. Local folklore places her as the “daughter” of the writer and critic Sibilla Aleramo.
A Room of One's Own became part of the public domain on January 1st, 2025. It was at this moment that Il Napolitanas’ transgressive understanding of “We” and her time in community with Marxists was finally actualized. Currently, there is also much research into her resistance work during the war. Il Napolitana was instrumental in organizing an underground literacy program for girls in the impoverished city center of Napoli and throughout all of southern Italy. Her tireless work allowed for many of the vibrant voices of writers and thinkers in post fascist Italy that are studied today.
Until recently, Il Napolitana was only known, in small literary circles throughout Europe and The Americas, for always wearing her fabulous signature leopard hat.
Performance at The Campus
Date: Saturday, July 19, 2025
Time(s): 12:30, 2:30, 4:30
Location: The Campus, 341 NY-217, Hudson, NY
As part of this year's 2025 Upstate Art Weekend, SEPTEMBER and The Campus, have teamed up for a special performance.
46 Gordon is a collaborative work by Nicole Cherubini and Julia K. Gleich. This seventeen-minute piece was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s seminal 1929 work, A Room of One’s Own, a cornerstone of feminist theory. The title references the address of Woolf’s drawing room, located at 46 Gordon Square in London. In addition to three scheduled performances, the installation will remain active, with performers inhabiting it throughout the day.
46 Gordon sprung from discussions between Cherubini and Gleich around sculptural space, voyeurism, and agency. These conversations coincided serendipitously with A Room of One’s Own entering the public domain, reinforcing their decision to center the work around Woolf’s essay.
Using the book’s six chapters as a narrative guide, the piece follows the fictional Napolitana—a sultry beauty, a forward-thinking intellect, and quite possibly the ghostwriter of the Surrealist Manifesto—who, after partnering with Woolf, works with her to actively radicalize the sitting room, reinhabiting a once-gendered space with agency and desire.
46 Gordon traverses time, featuring dancers in collaged Pucci-esque costumery moving from the deconstruction of the sitting room at 46 Gordon Square to the construction of an artist studio. The performance culminates in the precarious transformation of Il Napolitana’s persona into the radical embodiment of a sculpture—liberated as art yet still symbolically contained as a vessel.
The work is a contemporary interpretation of current affairs in conversation with Woolf’s text. Reexamining this essay 100 years later, amid current attacks on women's rights and freedoms, gives it a renewed relevance and urgency.
The upcoming restaging at The Campus is an extension of Cherubini's solo exhibition The Motherlode, currently on view at SEPTEMBER through August 3, and explores many of the same themes, including identity, feminist theory, and the socioeconomics of aesthetics— particularly the tension between excess and minimalist restraint the artist is known for.
The work was originally created for CounterPointe12 featuring new work by women choreographers and their collaborations with artists. 46 Gordon premiered at the Mark O’Donnell Theater in Brooklyn, March 7-9, 2025, and is Cherubini and Gleich’s second piece together: they previously collaborated with Meg Lipke on a dance that was supported by and performed at the Tang Museum in the context of Cherubini’s exhibition, “Shaking the Trees” (2020-2022).
Program Notes
46 Gordon
Danced by: Michelle Buckley, Kara Chan, Annie Freeman, Amber Neff, Ethan
Schweitzer-Gaslin
Music by: Morton Feldman, Julia Wolfe, Cristobal Tapie De Veer, Johnny Harris,
Alice Coltrane
Napolitana arrived in Paris in 1924, shortly after Mussolini was appointed Prime Minister of Italy by King Victor Emmanuel III. A sultry beauty, she was rumored to be poet André Breton's lover and muse, but in fact she was his editor, and most likely the ghost writer for the Surrealist Manifesto. Using the movement's practice of automatic writing as a guide, her original text was written without gender, from the position of the first person plural “WE”. Not surprisingly, Breton, not only assumed credit for the work, but also changed the text to the masculine singular “I” just prior to publication. It was also in 1924 that she started an active correspondence with Virginia Woolf. Although she and Woolf came from very different places with regards to class, culture, sexuality, education and economics, together, they deeply believed in radicalizing the sitting room. One did not need to abolish female space, it simply needed to be embodied with agency and desire. Together, Napolitana and Virginia collaborated on the seeds of A Room of One’s Own, the point of departure being ‘lecture as performance’, employing academic vernacular to relay oral history. Until recently, Il Napolitana was only known, in small literary circles throughout Europe and The Americas, for always wearing her fabulous signature leopard hat.
(Woolf recalled in her 1922 essay, there was no escaping the fact that everything had started at No. 46. ‘These Thursday evenings’, she wrote, ‘were as far as I am concerned the germ from which sprang all that has since come to be called by the name of Bloomsbury. And the headquarters of Bloomsbury have always been in Gordon Square.’)
Character Biography: Il Napolitana (Fictional)
Written by Nicole Cherubini
Il Napolitana.
Napolitana arrived in Paris in 1924, shortly after Mussolini was appointed Prime Minister of Italy by King Victor Emmanuel III. A sultry beauty, she was rumored to be poet André Breton's lover and muse, but in fact she was his editor, and most likely the ghost writer for the Surrealist Manifesto. Using the movement's practice of automatic writing as a guide, her original text was written without gender, from the position of the first person plural “WE”. Not surprisingly, Breton, not only assumed credit for the work, but also changed the text to the masculine singular “I” just prior to publication.
It was also in 1924 that she started an active correspondence with Virginia Woolf. Although she and Woolf came from very different places with regards to class, culture, sexuality, education and economics, together, they deeply believed in radicalizing the sitting room. One did not need to abolish female space, it simply needed to be embodied with agency and desire. Together, Napolitana and Virginia collaborated on the seeds of A Room of One’s Own, the point of departure being ‘lecture as performance’, employing academic vernacular to relay oral history.
Napolitana traveled back to Napoli in 1925. Due to her connections in Paris and London, she was instantly seen for her intellectual prowess and sophistication. She was instrumental in forming the distinguished reading group which included Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer, among other German Marxists visiting the area for inspiration and insight. Based on the essence and development of aesthetics, these meetings, which can be seen as the birth of critical theory, were lively discussions lasting deep into the early morning.
She arrived in England in 1928 to hear Woolf give her first two lectures based on their earlier thesis of and on the sitting room at the Newnham and Girton College, the first two colleges for women at the University of Cambridge. She stayed on for a bit, helping Woolf with the final edits before A Rooms of One's Own was published by Hogarth Press in Great Britain in 1929.
In the years following, during WWII, she traveled between the English countryside and Paris. Napolitana and Ithell Colquhoun were introduced by Breton in Paris in 1930 at the illustrious Café Cyrano while sipping mandarin curaçao cocktails. They instantly developed a strong bond through their similar interests in painting, occultism, poetry and writing. Napolitanas' simultaneously popular and critical cultural understanding of pleasure and beauty allowed for an expanse in Ithell’s then didactic work. There is speculation that Napolitana was an active participant and subject of many of Ithell’s Diagrams of Love, a series of watercolors and poems produced from 1939-1942 .
In 1939, She met Dora Maar at 14 rue de Halle, the home of Mary Renyolds and Marcel Duchamp in the 1st Arrondissement, Paris. Mary and Dora gathered women, artists and writers, for weekly discussions exploring agency and desire within the Surrealist movement. These meetings proved to be incredibly fertile for Napolitana and her work. Her conversations with Mary, about the political discourse of a book, as a conceptual object as well as a means of disseminating subversion, harkened back to and intensified her earlier work with Woolf. Dora and Napolitana struck up a fast friendship; they delved deeply into the dissection of photography, not as a focused surrealistic tool, but as feminist arms. And through these weekly encounters, Napolitana developed a working relationship with her “cousin” Frida Kahlo and Marcel Duchamp. Here, the three bonded on the transversive fluidity of gender. It was around this time that Duchamp found his alter ego, Rrose Selavy, Kahlo painted Self Portrait with Cropped Hair and Napolitana added the Italian masculine Il to her name, which was devoid of a patriarchal surname.
Traveling with Colquhoun and her lover, the Italian artist and critic, Toni del Renzo, Il Napolitana returned to Italy again in 1945, two years after the downfall of Il Duce, and just as women's suffrage took hold. In 1948, her “daughter”, the Italian artist, writer and filmmaker Lina Mangiacapre, was born. Lina is the founder of the radical feminist collective, Le Nemesiache in Napoli. Il Napolitana passed away on April 8, 1970 in Italy. There are no records of her birth. Local folklore places her as the “daughter” of the writer and critic Sibilla Aleramo.
A Room of One's Own became part of the public domain on January 1st, 2025. It was at this moment that Il Napolitanas’ transgressive understanding of “We” and her time in community with Marxists was finally actualized. Currently, there is also much research into her resistance work during the war. Il Napolitana was instrumental in organizing an underground literacy program for girls in the impoverished city center of Napoli and throughout all of southern Italy. Her tireless work allowed for many of the vibrant voices of writers and thinkers in post fascist Italy that are studied today.
Until recently, Il Napolitana was only known, in small literary circles throughout Europe and The Americas, for always wearing her fabulous signature leopard hat.
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