Velimna

Velimna is the artistic name of Valeria Cipolli, born in Livorno in 1984. The pseudonym is no casual choice: it is a tribute to the Etruscan roots of her land, drawn from the name of a prominent Etruscan figure, Arnth Velimna. “Etruscan of the coast” is how she likes to describe herself — and that definition already says everything about an artist who brings to her work the archaic depth of a civilisation that knew how to hold image, word and symbol together.

She has been writing since childhood: at twelve she handed her teachers her first hand-made booklet of twenty pages. After classical high school she graduated in languages and foreign literatures with a thesis on the contamination of languages in the work of Virginia Woolf — a formative path that perfectly anticipates what her practice would become: a continuous movement between word and painting, between poetry and image, without one ever prevailing over the other.

Her passion for painting, nurtured from an early age through charcoal portraits, found its full expression in the surrealism of her “Surritratti” — works in which the feminine is explored through a dreamlike and symbolic imagination. The protagonists are the “Fanusie”, white female figures immersed in oneiric worlds, accompanied by the “Truscoli”, small beings with an oriental allure. Recurring symbolic elements run through her paintings — glasses, cups, musical instruments and necks that become the focal point of the composition, constructed from objects, flowers and other evocative elements — in a style that art critic Plinio Perilli has described as a form of visionary painting capable of reinventing itself endlessly.

On the literary side, she won the Premio Giovane Holden and later the Premio Letterario Nazionale Teatro Aurelio in Rome with Abrapalabra, a poetry collection shortlisted for the Premio Strega Poesia 2024 — a small magical dictionary in which every word is translated into its poetic equivalent, where language becomes incantation. At the Florence Biennale she presented the collections Lunazioni and Malterità, confirming a well-established presence in the Italian contemporary art scene.

Velimna is, as she herself puts it, a commuter between words and colours. A voice that explores female identity through a surrealist lens, drawing on the lunar archetype and the womb as a symbolic space of transformation.