Of Death and Dying

Of Death and Dying is the thematic programme, presented by the Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio, led by theatre director and artist Cecilia Bertoni, in the spaces of the estate of the same name in Lucca (Italy). From September 2018 to December 2019, a rich program of 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, the ideological and the celebratory.

Besides the winning projects of the open call, aimed at all artists in every branch and hybridization of the arts, who presented in total more than five hundred projects, the program will include creations and productions by the Compagnia Dello Scompiglio, and discussions, exhibitions and shows by other artists and companies.

Saturday 27 April, from 11am to 7:30pm, opening:

Installation
Levi van Veluw
Sanctum
Curated by Angel Moya Garcia
Until September 22

The installation Sanctum, developed especially for Tenuta Dello Scompiglio, testifying of a fictitious religious conviction, engages all the senses of the visitor. Levi van Veluw based Sanctum on one of the first religious buildings, the Tabernacle, also called the Tent of Meeting. This tent served as a place of worship and symbolized God’s presence amidst those who had gathered. The interior of the Tabernacle consisted of three spaces: the Forecourt, the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, sacred in ascending gradation. Like the Tabernacle, Levi van Veluw’s work features symmetry and harmony, to express the striving for divine perfection and reflect the divine holiness through the careful gradations of the three phases. 

Installation
Cecilia Bertoni
Camera #5  
Sound Carl G. Beukman
Until September 22

The act of writing my will was the stimulus necessary to explore more substantially my death, the necessity of death. Browsing through history, revisiting aesthetic languages, I glimpsed in the funerary representations, the desire to carry the security of one’s own home into the afterlife. I, on the other hand, would like to sneak away from the materiality of my home, by which I mean also my body. I perceive death as an instant between two opposing and interdependent processes. For this moment of passing, I want to be able to strip off everything that belongs to this world in order to be able to beelsewhere, with lightness, without anchor. (…)
 I imagine my funeral and my body appears to me, naked, entering and burning in the flames, wrapped in this burial cloth on which I have embroidered the entangled alliance between earthly life and the otherworld. To draw this passage, I relied poetically on alchemical symbolism. (Cecilia Bertoni)

Artist-in-Residence outcome
Sabrina Mezzaqui
Autobiografia del rosso  
Until May 12

A small group of people is invited to perform a very slow, almost imperceptible action every day; search for death in the words of cherished poets; ask for help from masters of meditation, therapists, and spiritual guides in order to face or accompany death.

Winning project of the open call Of Death and Dying

Installation
Titta Cosetta Raccagni
I Cannibali   

In the last three years alone, 15,000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, and this is a conservative estimate. Most of the fish that live in the Mediterranean are carnivorous. Who are the cannibals?

Winning project of the open call Of Death and Dying

Video/Performance
Avelino Sala
Riderless Horse
Until September 22

The artist posits this video-installation, created as a result of a performance, as a symbolic exercise of anti-memorial, which calls into question the idea of the hero and leader, represented in classical statuary mainly as a man on horseback. The overthrow of power, the fall from the pedestal (not the whole statue, only the rider), gives us the horse as the only witness of memory.

Winning project of the open call Of Death and Dying