STABAT MATER

Pergolesi sacred work as a prayer for today's agricultural laborers

STABAT MATER is a sound and visual work born from the dialogue between the artistic research of Guendalina Salini and the musical project Canti Antichi by Elsa Lila and her quartet: Lorenzo Bucci (guitar and arrangements), Giulia Anita Bari (violin), Javier Salnisky (bandoneón), Giuseppe Civiletti (double bass).

Elsa Lila interprets Giovan Battista Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater in a completely original sonic guise, breaking the rigidity of the academic performance, abandoning the lyrical setting to give way to the natural voice, accompanied by an unpublished quartet composed of violin, guitar, double bass and bandoneón.

The viewer is taken on an exciting journey into Baroque music, an experience enriched by the vision of the portraits of some of the many laborers who lost their lives working in the fields created by the artist Guendalina Salini with a technique of tearing on poor materials.

Stabat Mater is part of the great tradition of art history that was inspired by the theme of the exploitation of the working poor. Suffice it to recall Van Gogh’s potato eaters, Courbet’s stone breakers, Salgado’s miners.

Music, portraits and videos make visible the lamentation of a Mater who is the earth itself, mother of us all, who weeps for her children.

Here you can see the video you find on this page relating to the presentation of the work at the MACRO ASILO contemporary art museum in Rome on November 16, 2019.

Here you can listen the live recording session of Canti Antichi at the Certosa Monumental Cemetry in Bologna.