The Last Lamentation | Santarcangelo Festival | July 13, 2024

July 13 h. 19.15 e 20.30

Valentina Medda’s performance project The Last Lamentation is presented on July 13 at Santarcangelo Festival in two performances.

The Last Lamentation is a funeral elegy for the Mediterranean, understood by the artist as a place of waiting, suspension and passing away, the embodiment of an absence, a collective ritual where the sea is conceived as a corpse, an extended, hybrid, fluid, interspecies body. A body of water, solid and liquid together, conveying and dissolving different bodies, liquefying the binary distinctions between the living and the nonliving. For Santarcangelo, the work flows into the Marecchia River, recalling themes of water scarcity, climate migration, the tragedy of the sea and the planet-here looked at from another temporality, distant but very near, from the point of view of the end. Orchestrated by 12 women who, with their backs to the audience, dot the landscape, The Last Lamentation consists of a repetitive and hypnotic vocal and choreographic score that reworks traditional codes into contemporary and abstract forms. Simple gestures are accompanied by a preverbal language that connects the mourners to their surroundings in a crescendo that becomes a litany, the result of the meeting of different worlds.