THE EXHIBITION
The Last Lamentation it is a funeral ritual for the Mediterranean, observed by the artist as a place of waiting, suspension and passing, embodiment of an absence – a deposit of bodies and the body in itself.
Valentina Medda crosses it in the evocation of a rite widespread throughout the area overlooking its coasts: the ritual crying, investigated at the end of the 1950s by the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, now almost extinct in Southern Italy, but living on the southern and eastern coasts from Lebanon to Morocco.
The exhibition revolves around the video work of the same name The Last Lamentation, produced between 2023 and 2024, destined for the collections of the MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art of Bologna: a work shot in Sardinia and created through a research journey in the territory, which tells the tragedy of the sea through a hypnotic choreographic score , vocal, sound.
The work reworks ritual codes in contemporary and abstract forms thanks to the collaboration with Gaspare Sammartano, composer, Claudia Ciceroni, composer and vocal trainer, Attila Faravelli, for aspects related to field recording.
Here the relationship between body, pathos, landscape is stratified by systems of absence and presence through the participation of a choir of 12 women dressed in black, standing next to the sea, an element which by contrast makes the silent presence of the dead more tangible and makes explode their voices.
The exhibition also brings together a corpus of works, many of which are exhibited for the first time, which the artist created already in the early stages of his study and which converge around the video work, retracing the moments of its elaboration: collage, inks on paper, photographs, drawings and some sculptural elements.
Since 2018 Valentina Medda has been carrying out research on the Mediterranean, which initially led her to work in Beirut in residence at the Beirut Art Residency. We find traces of this experience in the collages present in the exhibition, which make up a texture that is knotted around an original territory, Sardinia – the artist’s homeland – to then reconnect with the Mediterranean.
Together with the collages, the evocation of the handkerchiefs that accompany the crying ritual inspired by Cecilia Mangini’s documentary on the Apulian tradition, crystallize in the process of solidification through the firing of the ceramic, which burns the soul of the internal fabric leaving a void in the sculpture , an absence. To complete the restitution of Medda’s research, an artist’s notebook visually collects the scenes in a poetic storyboard. Images of the sea and some polaroids worked as if this water became skin, translate a visual horizon, which is both liquid and corporeal.
The project is presented by ZEIT (leader), in partnership with MAN Museum of Art Province of Nuoro , Sardinia Theatre , Arts Center 404 / VierNulVier (Ghent, BE) e Flux Factory (New York) in collaboration with the Sardinia Film Commission Foundation and supported by ARS – Shared Art in Sardinia for the Foundation of Sardinia (project sponsor). The cultural partners are Careof , BIG Bari International Gender Festival , RAMDOM , Alchemilla .
The artist is supported by the European Large-Scale Network Stronger Peripheries – A Southern Coalition thanks to the support of Sardinia Theatre , Bunker Ljubljana , The Mondaino Arboretum .
“ The work is conceived as a funeral ritual for the sea ” – declares the artist Valentina Medda – “a participatory performance inspired by the tradition of funeral laments in which a group of women dressed in black give life to a shared cry, a ritual that looks to the choir as the only possible language to tell a contemporary tragedy. In crying for the Mediterranean and its dead – continues the artist – the attempt is to give voice and body back through poetic and political action to those lives considered expendable, those that do not even deserve mourning, as the philosopher Judith Butler states. The sea here is an extension of the body, which loses its boundaries and becomes liquid, an aqueous creature. The question of where the body ends and where space begins has shaped, in fact, all my research over the last 10 years, through different languages and in different ways, questioning the distinction between the physicality of the individual and external materiality. in an attempt to create an embodied geography and imagine new hybrid bodies, finding the thread that binds all vibrant materials, living and non-living”.
VALENTINA MEDDA
Biography
Valentina Medda is a Sardinian interdisciplinary artist who lives in Bologna. He studied photography at the ICP – International Center of Photography in New York. His artistic practice unfolds 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 artistic and performance contexts from Bologna, Milan, Cagliari to Paris, New York, Beirut, Brussels and Amsterdam.
She was artist in residence at Couvent de Recollets, Paris; BAR, 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, among others, the Cimetta Fund for artistic mobility, Movin up of the Emilia Romagna Region, IAP Mentorship of the NYFA – New York Foundation for Arts and Tina Art PRIZE. His project Cities by Night Across Borders was selected among the 19 winners of the European program “Perform Europe”.
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