After mass in little Cerasuolo’s colossus of a church, the statue of the Virgin Mary adorned in jewellery, is carried through the lanes and streets of the village.
This video (00:30:23, Italy, 2018) came slowly in to being, emerging out of the village of Cerasuolo, close to Collemacchia in the municipality of Filignano, and home to The Museum of Loss and Renewal‘s residency programmes. The religious procession had been watched, participated in and written about by Tracy & Edwin across a number of years before the work was made.
After mass in little Cerasuolo’s colossus of a church, the statue of the Virgin Mary, adorned in jewellery, is carried through the lanes and streets of the village. Cocooned in their own singing, walkers dead-head roses, chat and slip in and out of doorways as they advance. The straggly procession is composed mainly of the elderly.
Towering over the village as it silently observes the wispy line of believers, the mountain, Monte Pantano, absorbs notes and words released once a year by a multitude of breaths as they rise only to be caught in the downy oak, the European beech, the olive, the turkey oak, the common lime, the sycamore maple, the black poplar, the sweet chestnut, the sessile oak and the stone pine.
Voice is material object; an instrument where authorship is devoid of tension, shared in the rubbing-up of the private and the public. The mountain is geological time, stratification nesting settlements that ripple through one another across Samnite, Roman and today’s peoples.
Social position is still affected by one’s relationship to land. Estate and class, and land tenure. In the mid 18th century the growth of rural populations could no longer be sustained by local resources. Napoleon’s army occupied; seasonal migration became emigration. Between 1880 and 1913, twenty five out of every thousand people left. Emigration has become re-migration; today’s village voices are Italo-Belgian, Italo-French, Italo-Scottish, Italo-American.
In terrain that man has ceased to work and that is resolutely the kingdom of the hawk, boar, bear, wolf, porcupine, salamander and the tree-toad what new emergences can we expect?