Gli Stati delle Anime
‘When I’m sitting here on my doorstep and people pass by, it feels natural for me to ask: ‘Do you believe?’. Some stop by and reply, and we start chatting. I always say: ‘Forgive the words of a poor old woman, but that’s who I am: if I have to say something, be sure I’ll say it’.GLI STATI DELLE ANIME is the narration of a narration. It’s the illustration of a long dialogue between an auditor and many narrators; of a screenplay in which a cantor meets many voices at a festival, at dusk, in a little village.
GLI STATI DELLE ANIME is the script for a prose and at the same time a choral testimony of a reality sitting on the edge: the pictures don’t give people and objects specific names or shapes, but they represent the fragments of a more complex landscape.
The places and bodies of this project were collected in Valnerina, a valley in central Italy were Norcia sits, between 2019 and 2021. The starting point is the work carried out by Maria Anna Stella during a workshop with, and for, the elderlies of Norcia and its hamlets: during the laboratory, she patiently collected hours and hours of anecdotes, memories, small and big events that rebuild the last century of life of the territory through the eyes of its inhabitants.
Maria Anna is actress and screenwriter, as well as co-founder of the association Montanari Testoni - a group of volunteers that was born in Norcia immediately after the earthquake in 2016, to offer support and services to the local community. After the telluric events and the following displacement of the population in the emergency housing units, the elderlies of the valley were left isolated, without any community spaces, without any reference point, and years later, the situation hasn’t changed much.
Their memories and the landscape they live in, are the most faithful things they have left.
text Francesca Gotti + Marianna Stella. graphic design Chiara Simion. self-published in 2021.