Valentina Medda

The Last Lamentation is a funeral ritual for the Mediterranean, here conceived as  a place of waiting, suspension and passing away, the embodiment of an absence -repository of corpses, and corpse per sé. The work  recounts the tragedy of the sea through a hypnotic vocal and choreographic score that reworks ritual codes into contemporary, abstract forms.  The powerful presence of 12 weeping women, dressed in black and standing by the Sea, makes by contrast the absence of the dead more tangible and causes their silenced voices to explode.

In the words of Maria Paola Zedda "Far from performance documentation, as from narrative film, the video work is an abstract narrative where the relationship between body, pathos, and landscape is layered by systems of absence and presence.  The work seems to look at different registers that recover the suspense, estrangement, and uncanny of Tarkovskian cinematography, tinging it with oriental tints that refer to the abstraction and image composition of certain Iranian cinema. Slowness is not attitude but dramaturgical tension, suspension, an imaginative stream that lets detail and tangentiality speak, and traces the coming to light of absence and the chorality of ritual."