Limen
A fractured archive suspended between ritual, memory, and technological decay.
Description
Limen is a multi-screen installation commissioned for SeminariaSogninterra Art Biennale 2023.
Developed during a two-month residency in the medieval village of Maranola, Italy, the work explores the suspended temporality of the procession of Saint Michael — a ritual repeated for generations in which worshippers carry the bronze statue of the Saint from the village, 300 metres above sea level, to the 1500-year-old mountain sanctuary, 1300 metres above sea level.
The installation is built from interviews with local inhabitants and archival audio-video recordings of the procession collected across more than fifty years. Fragments of voices, gestures, landscapes, and devotional actions are continuously recombined and altered, generating a fractured narrative suspended between documentation and disappearance.
The material is played through damaged and obsolete CRT televisions whose visual imperfections become part of the work itself: unstable images, chromatic distortions, electronic noise, and flickering light transform the archive into a fragile mnemonic space.
Rather than documenting the ritual, Limen investigates how collective memory survives through repetition, technological decay, and the continuous transformation of oral and visual transmission.