“Dall’Onda Anomala nasce Anna Adamolo!”

Anna Adamolo is a collective, fictional figure born in autumn 2008 inside the Onda Anomala, the Italian student and precarious-workers movement that opposed the Gelmini reform of schools and universities. Her name is an anagram of “Onda Anomala”.

A shadow minister for the Onda

She was “installed” at the national demonstration in Rome on 14 November 2008 as the movement’s sarcastic “Onda minister” of education, university, and research: a parody of the opposition’s shadow ministers, set against the real minister Maria Stella Gelmini. Anna Adamolo has no single face or author: everyone is Anna Adamolo.

Actions and appearances

Through 2009 she kept turning up wherever the movement needed a voice, among others: A pranzo con l’Onda, a protest against cafeteria prices in Ferrara (31 March), a campaign against media “neutral information” after she turned down an interview with the magazine Top Girl (April), her announced “wedding” with San Precario, patron saint of the precarious, on EuroMayDay in Milan (1 May), and a notte bianca at the Ferrara law faculty (6 May).

Book

Sono Anna Adamolo. Voci e racconti dall’Onda Anomala (NdA Press, ISBN 978-88-89035-30-6) was presented as the first book written by the movement rather than about it.

Anna Adamolo is also among the identities under which the artist Guido Segni (Clemente Pestelli) has worked, together with Fosco Loiti Celant, Luther Blissett, and others.