Libagione

Critical text

Libagione is a minimal ritual. In antiquity, libation was the gesture of pouring a liquid to the ground. wine, milk, oil. as an offering to gods or the dead. A small abandonment, a small ritual loss that consecrated the space.

I brought this gesture to Quadraro, the Roman neighborhood of the Nazi-fascist round-up of April 1944, for the eightieth anniversary of the event. Not an official memorial, not a monument. A slow action, shared with the neighborhood's residents, in collaboration with Alice Maria Sinn.

Memory needs rituals that don't claim to remember everything. It's enough to pour something on the ground. It's enough to interrupt the daily flow for a minute. It's enough for a gesture that no one watches but that happens anyway.

Libagione is a hypothesis of how the body can carry history without narrating it. only miming it, with the delicacy of one who does not claim to be right about someone else's pain.