versus

Versus (2024), set in the archetypal landscape of the Lucanian “calanchi” gives rise to a feminine procession of care and repair, in which black cloths intertwine with the fissures of the earth and the shadows cast by sunlight, almost as if to mend its wounds. The performance, documented in video and photography, is accompanied by a sonic fabric inspired by funeral laments and oral tradition songs collected by Ernesto De Martino and Diego Carpitella in Southern Italy and today preserved in the archives of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia: over three hundred Lucanian sound documents recorded between 1952 and 1963, offering a living memory of lullabies, work songs, and mourning chants.
The performative intervention stems from a participatory and shared process, involving a plurality of female presences engaged in vocal and embodied exploration developed during the preparatory phases. Each, through their lived experience, participated in a time of listening and care, giving body to an action performed at sunset, in a collective gesture of offering and opening. In that moment, the threshold between self and other becomes permeable, and the landscape transforms into a space of relation and welcome. The resulting visual device — between photography and video —does not merely document the action but, with formal precision and poetic density, restitutes the complexity of the gesture, the intensity of presence, the affective fabric binding bodies to the land. A choral action that resonates with images from Magia Lucana (1958) by Luigi Di Gianni, in which peasants, united in a collective gesture, raise their scythes to the sky to repel storms: a shared rituality, a physicality of gesture, and an alliance with the landscape as a form of resistance and intercession. In Versus, the female body becomes a ritual space, resonating with the earth, with and for the earth, evoking a mourning that is not only individual but collective and ancestral, a mourning of history understood not as rupture but as a profound movement of loss and transfiguration, a constitutive dimension of being and of its memory.