MUSCANTARA

MUSCANTARA is an immersive audiovisual installation drawing from Tarantismo, the ritual phenomenon rooted in Puglia and documented by anthropologist Ernesto De Martino in La terra del rimorso.

The work is built for a single viewer. A darkened twelve-sided room holds five back-projection screens on free-standing frames, with sound spatialised between them; the piece runs eleven minutes in a continuous loop, moving through three phases — the open landscape, the cave, the ritual. States of repetition, trance, tension, and release become compositional material, connecting the physical experience of the body with questions of memory, marginalisation, and collective transformation.

Developed through anthropological research and field recording in Puglia by a multidisciplinary team with roots in the region, MUSCANTARA approaches tradition not as something to reconstruct, but as a living archive capable of being reactivated in the present.

The choreographic act begins with a limp body lying on the ground in apparent calm; inside it the spider is still there, or the memory of it persists. The bite, its memory, is what the body wants to be free of — and so it thrashes, rolls, drags itself along on its back as if trying to escape; it digs in its feet, strikes its tailbone, writhes, tries to erase with its head. The rhythm of the tarantella takes possession of the body, which rises and begins to leap and turn; the bite, the memory, is still alive, and the body tries to trample it, annihilate it, cure it. In the end a caress asks the agony for a truce, but the body in its motion seems to rise toward the sky as it spins on itself — perhaps freed, perhaps still trapped in its hell.

Veronica Lillo