La signora dei santi e dei morti: Giannina Malaspina cantastorie

Giannina Malaspina is an elderly itinerant storyteller. Together with her husband, she was engaged in ceremonial activities in the rural and mountainous districts of the central Apennines, where she performed a ritual chant for the deceased of the house at host families. After the death of her husband she has spent her days in the cemetery: a dialogic practice that is expressed through different communication registers, renewing the relationship between presence and absence. On the occasion of November 2 - the Christian day of the commemoration of the dead - the storyteller directs an installation of devotional lights on the graves of the communities, by means of a mnemonic plot which defines it as a guardian of the collective memory and a protagonist of the dialectical relationship between the cemetery space, its burials, and the world of the living.