The Last Lamentation

The Last Lamentation is an art project by Valentina Medda, by Maria Paola Zedda, made possible thanks to the support of Italian Council (11th edition, 2022), a program for the international promotion of Italian art by the Ministry of Culture’s General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity, through which the artist investigates the tradition of ritual funeral weeping in the Mediterranean by placing it at the center of contemporary reflection.

The project is presented by ZEIT (lead partner), in partnership with MAN Art Museum of the Province of Nuoro, Teatro di Sardegna, Arts Centre 404 / VierNulVier (Ghent, BE ) and Flux Factory (New York) in collaboration with the Fondazione Sardegna Film Commission and supported by ARS – Arte Condivisa in Sardegna for the Fondazione di Sardegna (project sponsor). The work is acquired by MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna . Cultural partners are Careof, BIG Bari International Gender Festival, RAMDOM, Sa Manifattura, Alchemilla.

The Last Lamentation reconstructs a ritual action in which a group of women dressed in black address the sea, as if in an act of prayer, performing a repetitive and hypnotic sound and choreographic score,
reworking ritual codes into contemporary and abstract forms. Simple gestures and sounds connect the Sardinian lament with that of countries bordering the Mediterranean, resulting in a shared weeping that, through body and voice, recounts the tragedies of the sea.
A crossroads of present-day diasporas, in the work the sea is conceived as a place of reception and storage of bodies but also as a body in itself, gathering ancient and contemporary funeral mournings through a grand choral ritual involving local and migrant women.
Conceived as both live performance and video, the work is structured through a collection of materials and research related to women’s knowledge of the collectivization of grief and mourning.

The artist is supported by the large-scale European network Stronger Peripheries – A Southern Coalition thanks to the support of Teatro di Sardegna, Bunker Ljubljana, L’Arboreto Mondaino.

Valentina Medda- biography
Valentina Medda is an interdisciplinary artist from Sardinia who lives in Bologna. His artistic practice winds between image, performance and site-specific interventions, investigating the relationship between public and private, body and architecture, city and social belonging. His work has been exhibited and tours in national and international art and performance contexts from Bologna, Milan, and Cagliari to Paris, New York, Beirut, Brussels, and Amsterdam. She has been artist-in-residence at VOORUIT in Ghent, BAR in Beirut, Cité des Arts, Paris, Flux Factory, NY, Les bains connective, Brussels, MaisonVentidue, Bologna. In 2019, she was invited to the Grand Tour d’Italie, an international networking project of the Contemporary General Directorate of the Ministry of Culture.
He has received the Cimetta Fund for Artistic Mobility, Movin up from the Emilia Romagna Region, IAP Mentorship from NYFA – New York Foundation for Arts and Tina Art PRIZE, among others. His project Cities by Night Across Borders, was selected among 19 winners of the European program “Perform Europe.”

The Last Lamentation at MAN in Nuoro