Lingua Lunga, CONGREGATIONS 
x TOMBOYS DON’T CRY, Milan, 2023


A series of performances, talks and interventions in Isola Pepe Verde exploring the voices shared, shouted and heard in the reclamation of public space.

Lingua Lunga translates as loose tongue, big mouth or literally long tongue - a figure of speech used for someone with a ‘bad attitude’, that can't keep information for themselves. This non-normative body part is seen as a symbol for unaccepted social behaviours, carrying on prejudices and labels that queerness challenges. TOMBOYS DON’T CRY & CONGREGATIONS invited artists, musicians and writers to redefine lingua lunga as a way of being to be celebrated and taken up. In a site specific installation TOMBOYS DON'T CRY transformed the entrance of Isola Pepe Verde into a mouth, from where everyone is invited to enter.

TomBoys Don’t Cry, Site-specific installation, a mouth as the entrance to Isola Pepe Verde made of up-cycled cardboards
Darkroom zine launch, text by Maria Giovanna Drago, illustrations by Giorgia Rachel Donnan
Darkroom reading
the text follows the writer finding a Lesbian darkroom in a former porn cinema in 2012, Milan and rediscovers he city as a place in which they can belong.
Fightingdiscotinha, fabric, embroidery & poetry installation
Giorgia Rachel Donnan, live portrait session
Fuk-fuk, Rasputia,  commisioned sound space composed of sounds and rhythms of batuku and funana
Adele H, listening session
Sandra Cane, reading on queer studies and contemporary Palestinian culture
...
Giorgia Rachel Donnan, Bocca Come Spazio Pubblico, commisioned artwork pasted up across the city in collaboration UNCLE.

Isola Pepe Verde is a self-managed garden space in the centre of Milano. Beginning in 2012, a group of people came together starting to work towards turning this abandoned space into a community garden with an open-to-everyone atmosphere, hosting events with various groups in Milan. Lingua Lunga works as a temporary contributor to reclaiming public space by autonomous groups like those at Isola Pepe Verde. This one day long programme is a moment to remember land justice, history of queer cruising, and remember collective actions against social cleansing in an intergenerational gathering. A coming together of people to question normative social behaviours that are imposed on us through gentrification and the privatisation of public spaces where the pressure to fit in and shut up intensifies, inhibiting us to explore the possibilities of our senses, movements and desires.

Fuk-fuk is by Rasputia, commissioned by CONGREGATIONS, composed of sounds and rhythms of batuku and funana, two Cape Verdean musical styles, together with voices of artists from yesterday and today. Sounds, rhythms and voices blend and merge in a conversation that brings us a story of resistance and joy against the Portuguese colonial order in Cape Verde. These rhythms and sounds were forbidden in the public space while resisted in the mountains, becoming a weapon to fight for independence.
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 Lingua Lunga is the Milano chapter of CONGREGATIONS, an itinerant project curated by Ludovica Bulciolu and Brenna Horrox in collobartion with UNCLE.

 CONGREGATIONS is a research in practice project into the outside as both a physical and theoretical place; emphasising the importance of autonomous actions of coming together in living out from under the oppressive structures of homogeneity.

These congregations are a direct response against the privatisation of public space and the increased policing, surveillance and gentrification. Through working with local artists, collectives and makers of all kinds, CONGREGATIONS dives into the fabric of each place, highlighting the resilience of people from each place in forging their own urban history into the city's architecture.

These site-specific responses are an attempt to archive and celebrate the activity of these spaces by supporting their existence and vitality. Each iteration coincides with a newly commissioned artwork in the form of a flyposter reaffirming the history of this medium as an activist guerrilla messaging technique and a supplement to the energy that people bring to the streets.

Instal photography by Eleonora Arosio