I am nothing.

I’ll never be anything.

I couldn’t want to be something.

Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

Fernando Pessoa

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A shaggy and dusty Sardinia. A dance as rocky as the mountains, as bare as the dry branches of the trees and the shrubs scorched by a blinding sun. Time wears down the architecture and depopulates the villages. It scratches the walls, from which yellowed rubble is peeling away. It chips away at fixtures and window frames. Time is dust. It accumulates in empty houses. It settles on objects, fossilising them. Time is a stone in the hands of an old man, polished by the elements. (...) The crackling of footsteps. The rustle of shoes on the pavement. The dry rumbling of earth cleared by a spade. The warm vibration of guitar strings. The enveloping screech of the bow on the strings of violas and violins. A slow, painful dance. The dream of a madman. The delirium of a clown. The disconnected pain of a woman dressed in black. Figures with a mechanical gait, with an absent look like Kantor's characters, perpetually on the ridge between life and death. Weeping. A mute nostalgia, escaping through the body, with ankylosed choreographies made of spasms and syncope. The Nuragic landscape of Sardinia is a parched and abandoned horizon. In this land of desolate souls, the camera remains still. It delivers us a photographic novel in pictures. The colour palette is dim.
The long, very long shots stand out against a dramatic horizon that is more uneasy in contrast to the luminosity of this Mediterranean, rocky, prehistoric South. The steady, frontal eye of the camera investigates the colours and leaves their mystery unaltered. The sea at five in the morning. The disruptive wind of a parched August. These creatures belong to death. They smell their own decomposition. But they cannot rationalise it. They find no rest. A sense of exile pervades the choreographies of unrelenting, unresolved characters, who find an idea of closeness and community in contact with water, a synonym of drowning, an allegory of shipwreck, an invitation to cross, a symbol of rebirth. The sea makes life and death one. It initiates the resurrection of bodies as still as frames, after a last supper where even food is a celebration of absence. Ancient costumes and objects. Everything is fixed: the pain, the glances, the memories, the dance. Lost and exiled women. Disarticulated and disintegrated men. Everyone has mourning to process. They mourn things people, themselves. They are zombies in the half-light. They celebrate their own funeral before digging their own grave with their own hands. Stefano Mazzotta, graduated at Koreja and Paolo Grassi school, multimedia artist in assiduity with the “Third Theatre', intersects choreographic dance, literature, photography, and plastic arts.
And it finds the pharmakon in the wound itself.

The dancers metabolise their own death when they become conscious of it. They overcome it in the chorus that comforts the pain. They give form to a unanimous dance, where magic and madness coexist. A shipwreck in an ancestral South. A journey reminiscent of “Miracolo a Milano”, but also of a madman's dream in “Train de vie”.  Panoramic and human landscapes à la Isabel Allende. Faces marked by the wear and tear of life. Close-ups and panoramas à la Sergio Leone. Shostakovich’s trite 'Waltz No. 2' starts an angular choral dance, even more striking because it is framed from above. Flared. Never in time with the music. And it is precisely in the resulting dynamism that the redemption of this rural and wild South refractory to tourist routes peeps out, like an Arabian Phoenix ready to rise from its own ashes.
A hymn to life that does not defeat death. “Elegìa delle cose perdute" is a river of tears, of cries, of mystery. The cloudy wave lays bare the deepest roots. The torrent carries with it misfortune and laughter; ceaselessly, it drags this human land towards a beach where the bleak hands of those who have suffered finally find the hand that supports them. Where the eyes of the poor, who have had enough of crying, marvel at the eternal dawn, where the dream becomes reality.

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from a review by Vincenzo Sardelli for KLP