Of Death and Dying

Opening: September 15 2018
Tenuta Dello Scompiglio
 

The Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio, led by theatre director and artist Cecilia Bertoni, presents Of Death and Dying, a thematic programme, taking place at the Tenuta Dello Scompiglio in Lucca (Italy) from September 2018 to December 2019, with exhibitions, performances, meetings and scientific discussions, concerts, workshops, activities for children and residencies, focusing on individuality in relation to death and more specifically to its three dimensions: the socio-political dimension (euthanasia, abortion, suicide, the death penalty and accidental death as a consequence of conflict or natural disasters), the ideological dimension (atheism, agnosticism and religious, esoteric and mystical beliefs about life after death) and the celebratory dimension (funeral rituals and the mourning process).

11am–5pm
exhibition opening 

Gli Impresari 
Il lanternista
(The Magic Lantern Man)
until December 23, 2018

Gli Impresari (Edoardo Aruta, Marco Di Giuseppe and Rosario Sorbello) is an artistic collective researching those forms of artistic production resulting from intellectual speculation and technical innovations, which have defined the development of our visual culture. The project Il lanternista (The Magic Lantern Man) concerns a device that is commonly considered to be the precursor of cinema, in that it was one of the first instruments that enabled the projection of moving images, the magic lantern. The iconographic subject of The Triumph of Death, a detached fresco preserved in the Regional Gallery of Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, becomes the starting point for a performance involving the drummer Francesco Cusa, for the opening day.

Christian Fogarolli
Krajany
until December 23, 2018

Christian Fogarolli’s research is characterised by the relationship of art to theories and scientific disciplines, and how the latter unconsciously serve to advance the creative medium. The project Krajany concerns the Bohnice psychiatric hospital in Prague and the adjoining cemetery, in which the deceased were interred; the mentally ill and suicides of the nearby facility, and also soldiers of the First World War. Fogarolli’s archival research led him to discover how, in 1916, 48 Italians from Trentino arrived at this mental institution, having been transferred from the Pergine Valsugana asylum in Trento when the region became a front line in the First World War.  These 48 individuals all died within just two years and were laid to rest in this place without any precise information about their burials or their identities. Eighty six years later Christian Fogarolli wanted to reconstruct the historical event in collaboration with the Futura Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, the Bohnice archive, the Eleutheria Foundation based in Prague and the Pergine Valsugana archive in Trento. 

Alejandro Gómez de Tuddo
Columbarium
until December 23, 2018

Born in Mexico City, his work encompasses various artistic fields, mainly photography, video and installations.  Over the last seven years, in his tours of over 700 cemeteries throughout the world, Alejandro Gómez de Tuddo has made countless audio recordings and photographed over five thousand portraits of the dead. In the installation Columbarium, the artist presents a soundtrack using these sounds and reproduces some of these portraits, printed in black and white, on plain paper. The funeral portrait facilitates the observer’s entry into the psychic process of mourning and loss, as a record of a moment and a model that are no longer there. Entropy also makes up part of the installation, through the faces that have been erased, deteriorated or simply disappeared. Each face, each life, each loved being was, and is no more. These images of silent gazes, printed on a fragile and perishable substratum, are at the same time a manifestation of the impossibility of representing them and the representation of death itself.

5:00pm
Il Bosco delle Passioni (The Forest of Passions)
Promenade concert inspired by Descartes’s Doctrine of the Affections. 
A project by Guido Barbieri and Pamela Lucciarini with the soloists of the Recitarcantando Ensemble and Gianni Trovalusci on flute.