Inspired by Os Pobres, the stark and painful novel by Portuguese writer and historian Raul Brandão, Elegy of Lost Things is a multifaceted choreographic project developed by Zerogrammi over a three-year artistic process in Sardinia, within the residency programme Artisti nei territori / Interconnessioni.

Throughout the complex creative trajectory that led to the work, the company followed a working method refined over many years: investigating territories, contexts and diverse languages, while gathering a living archive of materials and testimonies. This archive nourished the dancing body with signs and inspirations drawn not only from dance, but also from other vocabularies—visual arts, video, photography and literature—and from an experience of the world grounded in relationships with places and people beyond conventional theatre settings.

The project generated four distinct yet interconnected forms: an award-winning medium-length film, a stage performance, a photographic book featuring an original text by Eugenio Barba, and finally a community project which, accompanying the performance, continues and expands the dialogue with ever new territories and communities.

In an exceedingly bleak world, made essentially of resignation and discomfort, unresolved existential questions and extreme deprivation, the characters in Brandão’s novel—confined within the deepest poverty like prisoners in the gaol that life itself seems to be—stage a slow procession of bitter reflections. From these they ultimately draw a general law governing the fleeting course of humankind: the living have no purpose other than to die and eventually become humus, fertiliser to nourish worms and the Earth, which nonetheless continues to turn.

Written in Portugal at the beginning of the twentieth century—a nation confronting the inevitable failure of its colonial project, the consequences of growing internal impoverishment and the collapse of the grand schemes of modern urbanisation—The Poor is a stark and painful novel that leaves no room for sentimentality or dreams of salvation. Human beings are damned, above all the poor, the most destitute. They inhabit the darkness outside, beneath an open sky that weighs like a lid, and the darkness within, in each person’s soul.

Let life follow its splendid course. It tastes of dream and iron. It is tenderness, misfortune, despair. It takes us, drags us, pushes us, fills us with illusion, scatters us to every corner of the globe. It bruises us. It lifts us up. It stuns us. It shelters us. It soaks us in the same vortex of mud. It kills us. Yet, even if only for a moment, it compels us to look upward, and until the end we remain with our eyes dazed.

Raul Brandão

In Elegy of Lost Things, the landscape evoked by Brandão’s literary reference—poised between dream and reality—takes the form of exile, nostalgia, the German Sehnsucht, and memory as a material that determines the traces of our roots and identity, while also determining our separation from them and the resulting sense of moral exile: the dream of impossible returns, anger in the face of time’s annihilating force, and farewell to what has been lost and has shaped the map of our inner journey.

The inquiry into the topos of exile goes beyond its geographical meaning to tell of the moral condition of anyone who may feel estranged from the world in which they live, placing them in a state of suspension between past and future, hope and nostalgia. The desire contained in this condition is not so much the desire for an immobile eternity, but for ever-new beginnings and for a place that remains: a place where it is animated by a rebirth that is living material, helping us to resist, endure and change.

The tableaux composing the narrative become the map of a journey through the inner places of the characters of Os Pobres: destitute figures, yet awkward to the point of clownishness, united by the same feeling of melancholy nostalgia and desire for redemption.

The space between the observer and these stories—and between these stories and the shared dream towards which they reach—is a Leopardi-like distance: the measure of a finibus terrae, a feeling of precariousness and suspension in the void. It is a grotesque parade of figures in transit, like clowns in a popular theatre flowering from a common yearning: a theatre requiring no ornament in order to happen, capable of telling itself anywhere—in a meadow, an alleyway, a courtyard, any place of life (Marc Augé)—a way station before the day’s end, with its horizons, distances, desires projected towards tomorrow, and vanishing points.

Bodies and landscape enter into dialogue in this elegy of the void that remains; they recognise one another in a shared desire, a somersault of thought, in a movement that is vertigo, surrender to the suspended, cyclical time of a waltz. It is a nostalgic sadness in its cyclical, suspended progression, asking to be celebrated and passed through, within a desire not for possession, but for belonging.

And then, within this logic, every idea of misery or possible poverty suddenly disappears: nothing can ever truly be lost.