Moroloja
Moroloja is an 11 min. video, inspired by Homer’s hymn to Demeter. It shows ayoung woman dressed in black clothes. She is alone, seated on a chair inside an abandoned house in Nodar (Portugal). She is Demeter, the goddess of grain and fertility. She is suffering alone, because she lost her daughter. She is living the experience of mourning. In her pain, she is human and vulnerable.
After the immobility, a ritual crying and chanting begin, one that evokes the mourning wailsof Salento, the southern part of Puglia, the Italian region where I was born.The “Moroloja” are chantsof the“prefiche”, womenpaid to wail during the mourning vigil ofsomeone’s death in Salento.
These women used to sing harrowing songs with violent and frenetic mimic, mixed with cries and shouts. They carried a white tissue on their hands that was shook, rolled up and pulled, creating a sort of rhythmic dance. In these old chants there were no references to the Christian concept of death and resurrection. After life there is only dissolution, the dark night. In these chants, quotations of Thanatos (the personification of death) and the fairy Fate who determines destiny were frequent.
The “moroloja” are chants improvised on a traditional canvas; the verses are in “Griko” (a language, derived from Greek, which is still spoken in some Salentine villages,) and alternate with strophes from the local dialect.
The “moroloja” were improvised and adapted according to the circumstances, to the audience’s expectations, to the gender and degree of kinship those women had with the person who was in greater suffering.
Moroloja is part of a video installation called “Demetra” to be presented in the form of atriptych with empty stone tubs inside the installation space. The videos reconstruct the story of Demeter after Persephone’s kidnapping. They represent the pain of a mother who wanders desperately in search of her daughter.
Manuela Barile (b. Bari, Itália 1978) is a vocal and an interdisciplinary researcher and performer that lives in S. Pedro do Sul county. Her artistic research is based on a projectual work that combines voice sounds with different mediums (“field recordings”, video, photography, installations, performance, concert-performance, drawings, written work). As a vocal performer Manuela Barile has worked and collaborated with numerous artists of the northern-american experimental movement. In June of 2006, along with Pino Pipoli, Barile participated in the contemporary art event “Fresco Bosco”, of which Achille Bonito Oliva was the curator. In 2007, she initiated a collaboration with the portuguese sound artist, Rui Costa, towards the development of the big scale project called “La Scatola”, which was conceived as a series of installation and/or performances. In 2009, Manuela contrived a sequence of sound and video installations presented in several museum galleries and european/north-american video festivals, about the meaning of places, entitled “Locus in Quo”.
ARTISTIC WORKS