I am Beatrice who urges you to journey,
Come from a place to which I long to return.
Love moved me to speak my heart to you.
(Inf. II, 70-72)
Let us summon one dear to us, a deceased friend or loved one, and take him or her with us, from the first moment to the end of a journey. Each person who decides to participate in “The Celebration of the Living (who reflect upon death),” in its fifth edition this year, is invited to bring along someone they have lost, to create a particular and pervasive dimension of accompaniment, starting with the preparations for the departure to reach San Cesario di Lecce. Each can bring to life this voyage-in-company in the way they deem best, relying on imagination, intuition, storytelling. Will this presence/absence guide our steps and our encounters, in order to speak, like Beatrice, with us and for us?
This year the Celebration of the Living, instead of a single pilgrimage on November 2nd, will extend through a longer period and be enlivened by an unusual form of participation, between the dead who speak through the living, and the living who meet through the dead. With total freedom, each person can decide if and when to introduce others to the invisible presence that accompanies them: for this to happen, we simply propose a space (Lu Cafausu) and a time (at dawn, every day from October 25th to November 1st). Across this span of days, the theme of the compresent relationship between the living and the dead will form the backdrop of gestures and conversations, until November 2nd, the final day, in which we will gather by walking, visible and invisible, from dusk towards dawn.
The Celebration of the Living
(who reflect upon death) 5th ed.
San Cesario di Lecce, Italy,
Oct. 25 to dawn of Nov. 2, 2014
More info.
