Inspired by Os Pobres (The Poor), the harsh and painful novel by the Portuguese writer and historian Raul Brandão, Elegìa delle cose perdute is a complex choreographic project that engaged the company Zerogrammi over a three-year artistic process hosted in Sardinia within the residency programme Artisti nei territori / Interconnessioni.

Throughout the articulated creative trajectory that led to the work, the company — following a working method consolidated over the years — questioned territories, contexts, and different languages, collecting a living archive of materials and testimonies that nourished the dancing body with signs and inspirations not only choreographic in nature, but also drawn from other vocabularies (visual arts, video, photography, literature) and from an experience of the world grounded in relationships with places and people outside the conventional containers of theatre.

From this process emerged four interconnected forms: an award-winning medium-length film, a stage performance, a photographic book enriched by an unpublished text by Eugenio Barba, and finally a community project which, accompanying the performance itself, continues and multiplies the dialogue with ever-new territories and communities.

In an exceedingly dark world, made essentially of resignation and hardship, unresolved existential questions and extreme deprivation, the characters of Brandão’s novel — confined within the blackest misery like prisoners in the jail that life itself seems to be — stage a slow procession of bitter reflections from which a general law governing the fragile human passage ultimately emerges: the living have no other purpose than to die and eventually become humus, nourishment for worms and for the Earth, which despite everything continues to turn.

Written in early twentieth-century Portugal — a nation grappling with the inevitable failure of its colonial project, the consequences of increasing internal impoverishment, and the collapse of the grand promises of modern urbanisation — The Poor is a harsh and painful novel that leaves no room for good sentiments or desires for salvation: human beings are damned, the poor above all, the most destitute. They are inhabitants both of the darkness outside, beneath an open sky heavy as a lid, and of the darkness within, inside each individual soul.

“Let life follow its splendid course. It tastes of dream and iron. It is tenderness, misfortune, despair. It seizes 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 protects us. It drenches 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 very end we remain with dazzled eyes.”
— Raul Brandão

In Elegìa delle cose perdute, the landscape evoked through Brandão’s literary universe — suspended between dream and reality — takes the shape of exile, nostalgia, the German Sehnsucht, memory as the matter determining the traces of our roots and identities and, at the same time, our separation from them and the resulting sense of moral exile: the dream of impossible returns, anger before the annihilating force of time, farewell to what has been lost and once shaped the map of our inner journey.

Within the investigation of exile as a topos, the work speaks not only of geographical displacement, but also of the moral condition belonging to anyone who may feel estranged from the world they inhabit, placing them in a suspended state between past and future, hope and nostalgia.

The desire carried within this condition is not so much the longing for a motionless eternity as it is the longing for ever-new beginnings and for a place that remains — a place where rebirth becomes living matter, helping one resist, endure, and transform.

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

The distance between the observer and these stories — and between these stories and the shared dream toward which they tend — possesses a distinctly Leopardian quality: the measure of a finibus terrae, a sense of precariousness, suspension over emptiness, a grotesque parade of figures in transit, like clowns from a popular theatre born of a common yearning, requiring no ornament in order to exist, capable of telling itself anywhere: in a field, an alleyway, a courtyard, any place of life (Marc Augé), a stopping place before the end of day, with its horizons, distances, desires projected toward tomorrow, and vanishing points.

Bodies and landscape enter into dialogue within this elegy of the emptiness that remains. They recognise one another through a shared desire, a somersault of thought, within a movement that is vertigo, abandonment to the suspended and cyclical time of a waltz — the form of a nostalgic sadness in its circular progression, asking to be celebrated and traversed within a longing not for possession, but for belonging.

And suddenly, within this logic, every possible notion of misery or poverty disappears: there is no longer anything that can truly be lost.