A GENESIS

Inspired by Os pobres, the harsh and painful novel by Portuguese writer and historian Raul Brandão, Elegy of Lost Things is a complex choreographic project that engaged the Zerogrammi company over a three-year artistic process, hosted in Sardinia within the residency programme Artisti nei territori / Interconnessioni.

Along the articulated creative trajectory that led to the final work, the company—following a working method refined over the years—investigated different territories, contexts, and languages, collecting a living archive of materials and testimonies. This archive nourished the dancing body with signs and inspirations not only drawn from choreographic practice, but also from other vocabularies—visual arts, video, photography, literature—and from a lived experience of the world grounded in relationships with places and people beyond the conventional frameworks of theatre.

This process gave rise to four interconnected outcomes: an award-winning medium-length film, a stage performance, a photographic book enriched by an unpublished text by Eugenio Barba, and finally a community-based project which, accompanying the presentation of the performance, continues to extend and multiply the dialogue with new territories and communities.

SYNOPSIS

Blessed be the instants and the millimetres and the shadows of small things.

Fernando Pessoa

This is the tragicomic story of a family of souls: poor, abandoned, the humus of the world (R. Brandão). Worn garments, in earthy tones, barely cover livid, waxen skin—so pale that the last light of sunset seems to gild it with gold. Their stories, though shaped by different forms of exile, are bound together by a shared sense of emptiness, generated by an inexorable absence and by the condition of utter poverty, inscribed in a present without resolution—tender, clownish in its sadness.

At times, they are accompanied by the minor euphony of simple, popular songs whispered to the night sky, or by the melancholic rhythm of a nostalgic waltz. What remains of their actions, of their futile efforts, is the narration of a feeling of loss—a catalogue of things gone missing.

Among them lives a poet named Gabirù, suspended on the threshold of this scenic space, coloured like a waystation. What for the others is a limit without hold—a cliff edge, a boundary, an ending—for the poet becomes a hyperbole: a here and now that is beginning, trespassing, invitation to travel, to crossing, to metamorphosis. From the edge of the present, Gabirù’s words move his companions beyond the purgatory of forgetfulness and noise, into a poetic time—silent, no longer distant but inhabitable, traversable.

A nostalgia for things that never were; for a small homeland never truly lost; the site of an invented memory. Past, present, and future imagined through the figures of this invention. The poet’s words and dance trace a hyperbole toward redemption, toward a promised land: a place one may go without ever arriving, by crossing a desire, a somersault of thought, a spiral of the heart, a hedge-boundary in the Leopardi tradition—from which to contemplate the disarming beauty of the infinite.