Simona Levi is the kind of activist who eats, breathes and sleeps her work. “I have no kids by choice, my activist projects are my kids”, she tells, “I am a 24/7 activist”.

Hailing from a lineage of political agitators where activism is passed down as family tradition, you might even say she has activism encoded in her DNA. Her forefathers include Primo Levi, a Jewish Italian chemist, partisan and Holocaust survivor who wrote about his experiences, and Carlo Levi, an Italian painter, writer, activist, independent leftist politician and doctor, who spent time in exile after being arrested for his political activism.

Simona’s own activism began in the classroom. As a young schoolgirl, she challenged her religion teacher on abortion during a period when it was illegal in Italy and later joined the women’s liberation movement’s fight for access to abortion services. The legalisation of abortion in 1978, with the introduction of Law 194, was her first taste of victory: “So my first experience in activism was that activism is worth it, because you can win.”

When art meets activism

Born and raised in Italy, Simona ended up in Spain in 1990 while “running away from a toxic boyfriend in Paris” and has never looked back. Since then, she has carved a reputation as fearless activist amongst Spanish civil society. While her passion and seriousness towards her work are evident, Simona approaches campaigning with a playful irony and throughout her career, she has fused art and activism. Take the play, ‘Become a Banker’, a tale of scandal and villains that excoriates the complicity of corrupt bankers and politicians in the Spanish financial crisis, which left a hole in Spain’s economy to the tune of millions of euros and caused immeasurable suffering. Despite the depressing theme, Simona says the play was “very funny” and “pure entertainment, especially because we initiated a court case and won, resulting in the conviction of 65 politicians and bankers. The play is the how-to guide of our successful conviction."

Photo from 'Become A Banker'

I wonder which came first - the art or the activism? Simona tells me she first encountered theatre when her mother was writing an activist play for children: “I reached the theatre more as a tool to do activism than the other way around.” However, Simona admits to growing sceptical lately about the power of theatre to mobilise the masses, telling me, “the people who go to the theatre are a very specific audience. So I don't think it's very useful for real transformation.”

If you were to compile all the jobs and professions Simona Levi has had, she would appear to have lived many lifetimes. She was first a professional dancer and actress before moving on to directing. Her first two shows, Femina ex Machina and Non Lavoreremo Mai, were about the rights of women.

Today, she is one of the founders and advocacy lead of Xnet – Institute for Democratic Digitalisation and Digital Rights, a Barcelona-based NGO that is fighting for progressive solutions to the 21st-century challenges faced by democracy. She also designs and co-directs a postgraduate course, Technopolitics and Rights in the Digital Era, at the University of Barcelona, has written several books, most notably ‘Fake You -An Activist’s Guide to Defeating Disinformation – Don’t blame the people, don’t blame the Internet. Blame the power’, and is part of working groups and social movements too numerous to mention.

So why the pivot to digital rights?

Digital rights activist origin story: Fighting censorship

Simona’s Internet activist origin story follows the typical narrative arc of many rights defenders. Once upon a time, she experienced a misjustice, and now she’s dedicating her whole life to making sure it doesn’t happen again - to anyone.

The villain of the story is the Spanish bank La Caixa, which requested that the play, Realidades Avanzadas, which Simona co-directed, be taken down from YouTube on the grounds of copyright infringement, because it included an image of one of its branches - even though, according to Simona, everything in the production, even down the score, was original. The theatre piece from 2007 criticised banks for property speculation and Simona labels the removal of the video as a form of censorship.

Having experienced first-hand the abuse of intellectual property protections as a tool to silence critics, from that point onwards, Simona learned everything she could about the relationship between copyright and the internet. Simona soon realised she wasn’t the only one bitten by copyright law: “Around 2004 and 2005 in Spain, there was there were a movement against digital levies and for free culture. But this movement was led only by men, so many men.” When Simona and other women tried to get involved, they weren’t allowed to join the boys' club.

And so, Xnet was born to give women and other less prominent people a platform for digital rights activism.

A new vision for digital infrastructure

A cornerstone of Xnet’s work is improving public digital infrastructures and democratic digitalisation - in layman’s terms, digital tools and platforms that are created, owned, and maintained by the people, as opposed to Big Tech. One such initiative created by Xnet is a digital workspace for school children using free and open source software that is rights and privacy-friendly.

Even as she breaks new ground in the world of digital rights, Simona never forgets her artistic roots. She injects her campaigns with a spirit of creativity and humour, often missing in human rights discourse, as a way to engage people: “I use what I know with theatre, the way you can reach the guts and the brain at the same time.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

More articles in the Meet Our Members series:

Using Creativity To Make A Positive Impact On Society | Meet Our Members

Movement Lawyering isn’t Always About Winning Cases | Meet Our Members

Collaboration, Not Competition, Is Our Greatest Advantage | Meet Our Members