Donna guerriera, eremita e suora is a project developed from a corpus of polyglot texts, composed as a sequence of invocations, prayers, biblical fragments, and rewritten hagiographic narratives. The texts are performed by Gaia Riposati and move across Italian, French, Spanish, and English, traversing registers and temporalities. These textual materials form the basis of the video and photographic installation developed during the Wicar Prize residency in Rome.

The project brings together feminine, queer, and dissident figures drawn from religious, mystical, and popular traditions: Jonathan and David, Ruth and Naomi, Phanuel, the Madonna of Montevergine, and Saint Sebastian. These figures appear as unstable textual bodies, recomposed through repetition, translation, slippage, and saturation. The video installation stages a body moving across devotional, mythological, and operatic codes without settling into any of them. The voice unfolds through accumulation and refrain, drawing from liturgical fragments, poetic invocations, and oral transmission.

Alongside the video, a series of photographic works extend this work. The figures of hermit, warrior, and nun open a space where gender, devotion, and embodiment remain unresolved. What appears as sacred narrative is displaced toward embodied, contemporary forms of queer devotion.

The project was developed in Rome between 2021 and 2022 within the framework of the Wicar Prize, the work was filmed inside the Église Saint-Nicolas-des-Lorrains, activated here as a site for re-engaging ritual gestures across queer, pagan, and dissident registers.

The installation was later presented in the exhibition Habiter le Trouble in Lille, in a curatorial framework by Flora Fettah, in dialogue with works by Sylvain Konyali, Lise Lerichomme, and Manon Thirriot.