Carmine Lo Regio

The work was done by creating a pinhole camera from zero, shooting in different cemeteries that were once mass graves. The work, is meant to be an investigation of the concept of death, dear to me as a subject, having developed for years now an OCD toward the subject-death, in its sacredness and spirituality, understood here as an escape point from the real. Above a voice reads, almost like a litany, Meister Eckhart's prayer. Is it in death that that annihilation of the will in relation to the One occurs? Is it in the event of death that we are definitively reunited with the One, becoming a uniform mass with one another, thus ceasing to be a numerable unity and mutating into a space in which everything is reunited?

The Atonement is a cinematic experience that depicts a lonely man faced with the failure of all consolation. Job is no longer the biblical patient, but a young, unkempt body that traverses bare and claustrophobic places as if they were psychic thresholds. Each environment is a fragment of consciousness that is consumed, a remnant of faith that has survived the collapse of all theodicy. In the film, the protagonist, realizes that no justice will come from above, nor from the community, nor from a shared moral order. If guilt cannot be redeemed, then it must be paid for. The Atonement becomes a self-imposed gesture, not a ritual expiation, but a real act of flesh and blood, of presumed justice inflicted on the world and on God in a desperate attempt to restore balance to the world when all is silent.

-- The divinity is worshipped in the work of art, both in the poor and in the excellent. The shudder of the divine, the destruction of the individual, pervades the assembly. But soon it draws breath, casts a glance at the living creatures, awakens to the feeling of life. They recognise themselves as life; they attune to one another, take each other’s hands, shake themselves, begin to move, begin to dance. […] Thus the divinity delights in itself, and humanity has identified itself with it. That delight has passed over into the eating of the divinity, yet this properly expresses infinite sorrow, the complete collapse of intimacy. God gives Himself over to sacrifice, gives Himself over to destruction. God Himself is dead; the highest despair of being completely abandoned by God.--

Casa d’altri // Fujenti was conceived as a diptych, two variations on the same religious theme, the paradoxical meaning of prayer and devotion. If, as Sergio Quinzio suggests, prayer is a negative moment marked by God’s constant lack of response, the first part, freely inspired by Silvio D’Arzo’s Casa d’altri, explores this question through a single figure. A wanderer moves among saints, churches and books, posing a scandalous question to theology. The second part shifts the same question from the individual to the multitude. Through archival materials connected to rites, processions and popular pilgrimages, the film observes bodies that pray, walk, wait, and offer fatigue, voice, tears and presence. Following Quinzio’s intuition, the praying figures do not appear as pacified images of devotion, but as needy creatures, beggars before the invisible, bodies asking for the fulfilment of a concrete lack.

What is a queer body in theological context? What can queer Eva do to free herself from the endless androcentric and patriarchal narratives? These questions can be answered by queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid:” Queer theology is the one who confesses distance from home without even knowing where home is for her, rejecting all representations of herself or her own representations of others that deny the reality of exile as a place to be. A theology that can only participate in the contiguous processes of representation of people in transit, nomadic subjects who follow their own deep desire for different forms of purity and holiness, and find grace especially in the lands inhabited by sexual exile.” Eve thus becomes here an uneven recomposition, embracing her figurative repetitions to the point of vacuity, through ecstasy, so it is not possible to direct oneself to the body without ruptures, discontinuities, inconsistencies, contradictions

Short film created for Second Life Contest 2022-2023.

A loudspeaker broadcasts an irreversible announcement: Judgment Day has been brought forward. No one responds. No one seems to be listening. Authority has been emptied of pathos, the voice has become a function, liturgy has been transformed into procedure. Shot on expired black-and-white Super 8 film, with an old digital color video camera and archival sound material, the film traverses a fragmented and opaque reality, where the substance of the image is consumed along with the world it is supposed to represent. The film presents itself as a damaged liturgical object, a magnetic relic that still transmits, but from an elsewhere already emptied of grace. A fragment of the end, caught in the act of its stalemate.