PLOT

I am nothing.

I shall never be anything.

I cannot wish to be anything.

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

Fernando Pessoa

A harsh, dusty Sardinia. A dance as rocky as the mountains, as bare as the dry branches of trees and shrubs scorched by a blinding sun. Time erodes architecture and empties villages. It scars walls, from which yellowed plaster crumbles away. It strips doors and window frames. Time is dust. It accumulates in abandoned houses. It settles on objects, fossilising them. Time is a stone in the hands of an old man, smoothed by the elements. (…)

The crackle of footsteps. The rustle of shoes on cobblestones. The dry thud of earth broken by a spade. The warm vibration of guitar strings. The enveloping screech of a bow across violas and violins. A slow, painful dance. The dream of a madman. The delirium of a clown. The fractured pain of a woman dressed in black.

Figures move with mechanical gait, vacant gazes reminiscent of Kantor’s characters, perpetually poised on the ridge between life and death. Tears. A mute nostalgia that seeps through the body in ankylosed choreographies made of spasms and syncopations. The Nuragic landscape of Sardinia appears as a parched, abandoned horizon.

In this land of desolate souls, the camera remains still. It offers us a photographic novel in tableaux. The colour palette is muted. Long and very long shots stand out against a dramatic horizon, all the more unsettling for its contrast with the brightness of this Mediterranean South—rocky, prehistoric. The camera’s fixed, frontal gaze probes colour while leaving its mystery intact.

The sea at five in the morning. The disruptive wind of a scorched August. These creatures belong to death. They sniff their own decomposition, yet cannot rationalise it. They find no rest. A sense of exile permeates the choreographies of unconnected, unresolved figures, who discover a sense of closeness and community through contact with water—synonym of drowning, allegory of shipwreck, invitation to crossing, symbol of rebirth.

The sea fuses life and death. It initiates the resurrection of bodies as motionless as the frames themselves, following a last supper in which even food becomes a celebration of absence. Ancient costumes and objects. Everything is fixed: pain, gazes, memories, dance. Lost and exiled women. Disarticulated, disintegrated men. All carry a mourning to be processed. They weep for things, for people, for themselves. Zombies in the half-light. They celebrate their own funeral before digging their grave with their own hands.

Stefano Mazzotta—trained at Koreja and the Paolo Grassi School, a multimedia artist closely linked to the “Third Theatre”—interweaves dance, literature, photography, and visual arts, finding the pharmakon in the wound itself. The dancers metabolise death by becoming conscious of it, overcoming it through a choral dimension that comforts pain. They give shape to a unanimous dance where magic and madness coexist.

A shipwreck in an ancestral South. A journey recalling Miracle in Milan, as well as the madman’s dream in Train de vie. Panoramic and human landscapes in the vein of Isabel Allende. Faces worn by the erosion of life. Extreme close-ups and wide shots reminiscent of Sergio Leone. Shostakovich’s overused Waltz No. 2 triggers a jagged choral dance, made even more evocative by its overhead framing—flared, never fully aligned with the music.

It is precisely in the resulting dynamism that the redemption of this rural, wild South emerges—resistant to tourist routes—like an Arabian phoenix ready to rise from its own ashes. A hymn to life that does not deny death. Elegy of Lost Things is a river of tears, cries, and mystery. The cloudy wave lays bare the deepest roots. The torrent carries misfortune and laughter alike, dragging this human land toward a shore where the rough hands of those who have suffered finally find another hand to hold them—where the eyes of the poor, tired of weeping, open in wonder at an eternal dawn, where dream becomes reality.

(from a review by Vincenzo Sardelli for KLP)

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 three years of artistic research, hosted in Sardinia within the residency programme Artisti nei territori / Interconnessioni.

Following a working method refined over time, the company explored diverse 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 choreography, but also from other vocabularies—visual arts, video, photography, literature—and from lived experience grounded in relationships with places and people beyond conventional theatrical frameworks.

The process generated 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 project that accompanies the performance and continues to expand dialogue with new territories and communities.

REFERENCES

In an exceedingly dark world, shaped by resignation and distress, unresolved existential questions and extreme deprivation, the characters of Brandão’s novel—segregated within the blackest poverty, like inmates of a prison that seems to be life itself—stage a slow procession of bitter reflections. From these emerges a general law governing the fragile trajectory of humankind: the living have no purpose other than to die and finally become humus, fertiliser for worms and for the Earth, which nevertheless continues to turn.

Written in early twentieth-century Portugal—a nation facing the inevitable collapse of its colonial project, the consequences of growing internal impoverishment, and the disintegration of modern urban aspirations—Os pobres is a harsh and painful novel that leaves no room for consolation or salvation. Humanity is damned, the poor above all: inhabitants of hidden recesses both outside, under a sky that presses like a lid, and inside, within the depths of each soul.

Let life follow its splendid course.

It tastes of dream and iron.

It is tenderness, disgrace, despair.

It seizes us, drags us, pushes us, fills us with illusion, scatters us across every corner of the globe.

It bruises us. It lifts us. It stuns us. It protects us.

It soaks us in the same vortex of mud.

It kills us.

Yet, even if only for a moment, it forces us to look upward—

and until the end, we remain dazed.

Raul Brandão