I Baccanti
2021 - 2022

In May 2020, in a sketchy neighborhood in the city of San Severo near Foggia, about three hundred people took part in the celebrations for the Madonna del Soccorso. They were not wearing masks and they defied the ban on gatherings due to Covid restrictions. Several videos appeared on social media, all taken with mobile phones by the participants, who chase each other in the midst of the extremely powerful fireworks explosions. In addition to that, someone posted a dedication to a local mob boss, killed two years earlier in an ambush. In the images released, we see no intervention by the law enforcement.

I Baccanti (Bacchantes) focuses on one of these videos, sampling isolated details from pairs of frames in succession. In each passage from one frame to another, there is always a change of lighting in the scene, due to the explosions of fireworks. Cut, enlarged, fused together, devoid of any contextualization, detached from the excitement of the flow of images and far from the noise of fireworks, the frames reveal a new aesthetic dimension, as they seem to evoke new historical and anthropological meanings. It might seem we are observing churchgoers intent on prayers, a handful of men grappling with a hunting expedition, a group of people immersed in the celebration of archaic and unbridled rituals, in the midst of nature and surrounded by large fires. The same fires gradually become powerful explosions, turning the images into war scenes. 

There is something sacral about these pictures: time expands, we witness the the archaism of these religious rituals hardly fitting into our contemporary media landscape – suffice to see how these scenes are all recorded on smartphones, which appear in numerous images –, we witness the anger of the poorest and most marginalized classes and the failure of the State – “an unacceptable challenge to the city and to the State” comments the mayor the day after the events –, we witness the latent violence that is unleashed by their encounter, and finally, as already mentioned above, we find a sense of sacredness altered by passion.